Swimming and the Body

One of the things that I love about swimming, particularly swimming in the sea, is that it is an activity which is not so much ‘how do I look doing this?’ as ‘Oh, I love this!’  If you’re someone who carries around a yoke of (probably mildly irrational) self consciousness with you, this is a very big deal. Not always imagining that constant, critical audience; ready to jeer at your every move. When swimming somewhere that’s not too crowded, looking out at the horizon, I cease worrying about how I look and merely focus on how I feel.

I’ve tried to evangelise about this down the pub; about not worrying how something makes you look - how sweaty you become or what it does to your hair, I’m sure I’ve sounded tiresomely bogus but I’m just trying to spread the good news. Swimming makes me feel marvellous; at one with the world and more at peace with myself, it could do the same for you! 

Marazion Beach

From a young age I waged war against my body; I cruelly seized bits of it between my fingers and wished it away, I pinched it and hurt it. I starved and berated it, ignored it and tried to pretend it wasn’t there and still it served me as all of our bodies do. My body served me well - carrying me around, healing wounds and nurturing the human beings who grew within it. Why are we taught to hate our bodies so much? To try and mould them into some kind of impossible faux Platonic ideal, when the goalposts keep moving anyway? When I was young the ‘fashionable’ body shape for women was a flat chested, half starved ‘waif’, at this moment it seems to be a cartoon, Jessica Rabbit, hourglass figure.
I read somewhere that wanting to lose weight was very rarely about wanting to be thinner, it was about being acceptable to other people. And that is probably true of anything we want to change about our appearance - the wish to be acceptable to others - that invisible audience again.  At the heart of this is wanting to be lovable. 

I recently entered a micro story competition, the challenge was to write a 100 word story based on a picture. The picture was of a lighthouse, with the sun setting on the sea. It was a peaceful image filled with soothing colours. The sea was calm and still. I tried to banish the prosaic reality of the function of a lighthouse being to warn sailors away from the rocky shore and write about swimming instead! The image reminded me of an evening swim I’d had at Marazion Beach in Cornwall, near St. Michael’s Mount. The water had been wonderfully cool and silky - not bracingly cold and I’d managed to get to that happy state of Zen-like contentment. We were all sticky from our visit to a tropical garden that day and a swim was a perfect way to end the day. 

Light on the Water

Nowhere to park in the whole of Southport. Trapped like wasps in our hot car. We get to the rocky beach at five and unpeel ourselves from sticky clothes. I wrestle with the shame of my bulging outline. 

Picking over the painful pebbles we run into the sea. I plough through the oily shallows; gentle waves tugging playfully.  The kids splash behind me and I pretend we're a family of seals. 

Cool water. I send a silent prayer to my body - I’ve been so busy absorbing the disapproval of others that I’ve forgotten to appreciate the pleasure it can bring.

I didn’t win the competition - maybe mine’s not a story at all and more of a poem or a vignette but I enjoyed writing it and I’m grateful to it for reminding me of how much I love swimming!

First attempt at capturing the scene in pencils

Solstice-mas

Good morning to you. Who’d have thought we’d still be living like this, three months on. I hope you’re keeping well.

I’ve started writing this week and it feels brilliant to be writing.  The writing has been only moderately painful, as opposed to feeling like every word was being dragged out of me with a rusty, steel rope. If you are somebody who writes you will probably know what I mean, if you are not then I don’t really know what to compare it to - the performance of a task which feels difficult, troubling, arduous, but at the same time immensely satisfying. Maybe it’s like running uphill, then coming to the summit and looking out at a stunning view. Not that I’m saying that anything I’m producing is stunning, just that maybe things feel more gratifying when we have to work at them.

What else? Yesterday we had a Summer Solstice picnic.  Sadly this didn’t involve running around naked and jumping into a lake but we did have a lovely, socially distanced picnic with some friends. The kids ran off and made a den in the trees. I’d got the five kids (our children and their pals) a little present to unwrap, to give the whole thing a sense of occasion. This gift was a hot chocolate kit, consisting of a large chocolate ‘spoon’ with a packet of marshmallows, and some novelty sticky notes. The children seemed pleased and promptly ate the chocolate spoons and marshmallows - the kit never made it to the hot drink stage.
For years we’ve been talking about having some kind of solstice celebration, not because we are particularly spiritual or close to nature but because all our birthdays are in Autumn/Winter so the celebrations are always indoor affairs. I used to gaze wistfully at the families having parties in the park, with cake and balloons and think 'that looks like fun'. The lockdown situation has forced our hands - let's really do it this year, we said, let's mark Midsummer's Eve in some way.

We didn’t have cake or balloons. (The Old Man had made a cake but it wasn’t ready in time). But we did have Prosecco and Pimms and strawberries and posh crisps and samosas and some homemade fish cakes, the recipe having been passed down along the generations in my family. The fish cakes are even spherical so, at a stretch, could be said to be representative of the sun. 

Rustic cooking

It was one set of friends’ wedding anniversary that weekend so it felt like a double celebration. Our bladders held out admirably (the public toilets being closed), a good time was had by all and a bunny rabbit scampered away in the distance! 


When we got home we exchanged our main presents - something we had decided would be a part of our personal Solstice celebration. The kids were very pleased with their Harry Potter Lego and the Old Man was happy with his new bread knife and I was over the moon with my bound set of Jane Austen novels!

But Solstice isn’t just about the presents - the best thing about it was being able to meet up with friends and have a chat and share our food and relax a bit. Of course we talked about the situation but we also talked about many other things. And for once the kids didn’t moan about being dragged out for a walk because their friends were at the end of it!

Oh - we didn't watch the sunset because you can't really see it from our flat but we are going to be fine tuning this celebration so we'll definitely make a point of watching it next year.

Captain's log 5:1

I am a great admirer of people who ‘get things done’. Those folk who transform their living spaces into something that looks like it has come from the pages of a lifestyle magazine, almost as soon as they’ve unpacked their boxes. These people don’t put off unpacking their boxes in the first place, they get straight down to it. People who don’t feel defeated before they’ve even begun, people who totally have their shit together. Needless to say I am not one of those people.
I like to think that the reason I don’t make much physical, tangible progress is because I’m more of an internal person, living in my own head. Mine is a subterranean landscape, just as sparkling, colourful and well maintained as your living room, just not visible to the naked eye.

So, what have I done since lockdown began?

• Completed a third round of edits for my WIP (Work in progress).
• Written a short story based on the prompt from the Curtis Brown Creative - Weekly Writing Workout course. https://www.curtisbrowncreative.co.uk/the-weekly-writing-workout/
• I realise that you probably don’t care about the two things listed above, but writing felt like an agonising, almost insurmountable chore at one point, so anything that frees up the process is good.
• Read a bit of Wintering by Katherine May.  https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Katherine-May/Wintering--How-I-learned-to-flourish-when-life-became-frozen/24330069 The blurb on the cover is right - it is a beautiful book and one which makes you feel, fleetingly, closer to the natural world, which brings me to my next point:
• Got a lot of pleasure from observing the flora and fauna on our daily walk, particularly the mighty Mistle Thrush. 

  

  Mistle Thrush (we think) 

   I’ve mentioned it before but I’m really appreciating seeing the small changes around us, as the season turns, and it’s a real joy to see this bird on our walk, it’s status is 'Population decreasing' so I feel privileged to be able to spot it.
• Fed the fishes - the huge carp are like something out of a cartoon. You can imagine them having a full on war with the duck who keeps bullying the poor, pretty Mandarin ducks, chasing them away when you try to feed them. The duck pecked at the fish as they tussled for food but the fish are so big I can imagine them all getting together and fighting back. 

  

  BELEAGUERED MANDARINS

• 
  

• 

  CARP ARMY

  
  
• Put in quite a few hours at work. Work is a welcome diversion - who knew?
• Done quite a bit of Just Dance. I’ve finally found an exercise that makes you sweat, that I actually enjoy!
• Watched Deutschland 83 on All 4. Just when you think you'v exhausted all the box sets! I keep banging on to everyone I know about this series but it is sooooo good! I now only want to watch stylish thrillers that are set in the past! It is pacey, compelling and wry. https://www.channel4.com/programmes/deutschland-83      

  

  Martin/Morris in Deutschland 83

• Have learned how to do planks, thanks to Joe Wicks. (I’m still fat btw, don’t think all of this exercise has narrowed my silhouette, it hasn’t, maybe that has something to do with all the wine...or the Kit Kats….or the ersatz Frazzles)
• Done a visual diary - even if I can’t draw. My goodness you are in for a treat. If you thought Space Dorg was bad, etc, etc, but again, it’s often easier to express things in pictures rather than words, so (insert shrug emoji - my most overused emoji, here.

Hope you are well. See you on the other side! xx

Sometimes it's not great

This won’t be a jaunty, upbeat post because I wasn’t really in a jaunty, upbeat place when I wrote it, more of a reflective one. I haven’t had a terrible week but there have been terrible moments within it. I’ve had moments where I feel like an utter failure - as a mother, as a worker and as a human being…. then my period arrived and the angst and self loathing shrank to a manageable size. 

The grief from losing my father, just after Christmas, is still very much there. This is understandable, I guess, but maybe I’ve been trying to tidy it away for the lockdown period, to make coping with the restrictions that have been placed on us more bearable, but it usually grabs me just as I’m going to bed. I still can’t see photos of my Dad without crying and I feel guilty for not thinking about him more. This very unusual situation of collective crisis has created a general forum where people can share what they’re going through - the strictures, the frustrations and perhaps the unexpected benefits. Grief on the other hand, can be a very solitary experience. I can try and channel my sorrow into anger at people (joggers) selfishly veering towards me on the path and my family when we are having our daily walk or I could try to confront the real source of the feelings.

Traditionally I’ve always tried to deal with feelings by outrunning them. Not literally, otherwise I’d be more svelte, but figuratively, by being on the move all the time. The reason I feared that lockdown would feel like being buried alive was because ‘STAY AT HOME’ was the antithesis of what I felt like doing. Home was a place where thoughts became most intrusive, hectic and unhelpful - there was nowhere to hide. I wanted to be constantly on the move - I wanted to be at the pub, or a pub quiz, or the theatre, cinema, park, public gardens, swimming pool, even work - anywhere but home. It wasn’t that I wanted to be away from my family, I was happy to have them with me, wherever I went, I just didn’t want to be at home. And all the places that are shut off from us now, were all the places where I chose to hide. Of course, I’ve found a way of replicating the sensation of movement - the exercise, the dance, the daily walk (yes, actual movement, I know) and I’ve found an effective way of blocking things out and hiding in a bubble at home, thus creating the illusion of space around me, via some super expensive, noise cancelling headphones. Anti-social, maybe and not dealing with the underlying cause of the angst, the hyper-sensitivity to noise, but absolutely necessary, right now. Just as I couldn’t face up to the implications of the Coronavirus, when news of it was first broadcast, I can’t deal with any heavy soul searching as I deal with the enforced lockdown now.
As I’ve said before, one way or another, all of my energy is focused toward staying sane.

Are you looking for some light relief?
I've been reading and enjoying The Flat Share by Beth O'Leary.

I've been enjoying the plays broadcast on YouTube by the National Theatre.
I've made some green slodge aka watercress soup. 

Tasty!

I very much enjoyed Quiz - the TV program based on the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? coughing scandal. https://www.itv.com/hub/quiz/2a7854
I'd seen the play a couple of years ago when a friend won tickets - very appropriately as a prize for winning a quiz, and the play was fantastic! We got to vote on 'ask the audience' voting keypads, at the beginning and end of the play as to whether we thought the Ingrams were guilty or not. The audience were swayed by the play's argument and voted very differently at the end. I was worried that the TV program wouldn't measure up but it was very enjoyable and of course, Michael Sheen did his usual chameleon act when he morphed into Chris Tarrant.

Sian Clifford, Matthew Macfadyen and Michael Sheen as Diana and Charles Ingram and Chris Tarrant

So, light and shade, yeah, light and shade. 
I also attended a talk on the concept of ‘Wintering’ by the author Katherine May, who has written a book with the same name. The book describes Wintering as: 
 "a fallow period in life when you're cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress, or cast into the role of an outsider."

The talk was quite helpful and comforting. I’ve ordered the book from Hive books - a site where they support the local bookshops and source the stock from there. https://www.hive.co.uk/?gclid=Cj0KEQiA-NqyBRC905irsrLr-LUBEiQAWJFYTs6sUijqVCt_gmRe2G6e87qBDqXpPuBMdsfoRjd7eS8aApLQ8P8HAQ 
I’ll let you know how I get on.

Take care. xx

I still haven't learned a new language

Dear Reader

How are you feeling? Worried, stressed, sad, tearful, angry, resigned, horny, outraged, tired, productive - are you feeling productive? Have you done something with seed beds in your lovely big back garden?  Have you learned how to say - 'A sparkling mineral water for me, if it's not too much trouble, please?' in Mandarin? Have you cleared out your whole wardrobe and colour coded everything that remains?

I haven't done any of those things, I haven't even managed to clean the bathroom yet, although I've been talking about it for days. To be honest, all my energy has gone into staying sane - something which is very important in these surreal and unsettling times, I feel.

Things that are keeping me sane

COOKING

Yeah, still cooking, I'm afraid, it's the only thing that is giving me a sense of accomplishment these days. I was so proud of my tortilla, I really didn't want to make it, had already made a paella and was starting to lose interest, as I'm wont to do but no, I made the frigging tortilla and it came out of the pan, nearly whole:

OK, so it ain't pretty, it looks like some kind of igneous rock (whatever the Hell that might be) but I was ludicrously proud of it. I thought it was delicious, my younger daughter seemed offended that it didn't taste like the (ready made) one we'd had on holiday - when we were in Cornwall.... She liked the paella but hated the tortilla, her sister liked the tortilla but hated the paella (I think she said it had baked bean sauce in it which was outrageous as I'd made that dish from scratch!) Anyway, I'd still cooked something, using the ingredients we had to hand and...and I liked the paella and the tortilla.

'JUST DANCE'

Oh. My. God. I love it! I wake up with the songs in my head. Today, a Saturday, a Joe Wicks-less day, I said to him indoors - 'Lets' dance to Illusion and then to that weird jumping song.' Today I danced for about an hour and a half and racked up the old digits on my Fitbit. Now, will I be brave enough to share a picture of me with the 'Just Dance' controller. Even though it was a heavily staged picture and I'd rejected many, many others that I'd got my daughter to take, where I was actually dancing but looked like a de-shelled mollusc, I'm still not happy with this one, but are we ever? I mean, you might be, reader - happy with your picture, but then you're gorgeous. ;)

I am the eggman, I am the walrus...

Thing is, as the Body Positivity community are always keen to stress, and I know I'm repeating myself here, it's not about how you look it's about how you feel! 

I woke up feeling tired and irritable and with a cough that worried me but after an hour and a half of 'Just Dance' followed by a shower, I felt much, much better, and as if being a de-shelled mollusc might not even be such a bad thing.

REWATCHING and REREADING

F off, spellcheck, Rewatching is a word - if rereading can be a word then why not rewatching?

Rereading comfort read books where there are no nasty surprises, rewatching favourite shows where you came to love the characters but there are still enough clever details in there to give you a (pleasant) surprise. 

APPRECIATION OF NATURE

We don't have a proper garden, we have a tiny bit of wooden decking, about the size of a Persian rug. And yes, I do realise that we're lucky to even have that, thank you very much. We are also very lucky to live near a big park and try to get there every day. We've worked out an off-the-path way of trying to avoid people and tend to walk a very similar route every time we go. Instead of resenting this I've realised that we can try and use this to notice the natural changes that happen over the course of time. So the big tree that had little, spiky dark bobbles on it's branches, is now resplendent with lush green leaves. (humour me with the pretentious language, OK.)

Is it even the same tree?

I'll be honest with you, Reader, when they first announced the lockdown, I legit thought that it would feel like being buried alive, but you get into a bit of a routine, don't you?

I'm sorry if you don't have any of the resources I've detailed available to you (although I believe that 'Just Dance' is available on Youtube). Give me a shout if you need to talk. Oh, sorry, your face just froze for a minute there - bloody Skype/Zoom/WhatsApp/Houseparty etc!

Oh, and I realise that you probably won't read this because you're too busy having fun in your massive garden! :P 

The Ugly Side of Exercise

I don't know about you, Reader, but I've been feeling a bit ragey this week. Moody, furious, tearful, depressed and very, very angry. Lockdown is taking its toll, as is the clock change - always a bit jet-lag-inducing at the best of times and this is not the best of times!
We all know that exercise is good for us, especially when it comes to counteracting rage, but is it really so good? When you think about exercise, do you think about a svelte, serene woman doing tree pose (Vrikshasana)? 

Me and my bestie, doing Yoga in simpler times...

Or some hench guy doing speedy press ups as effortlessly as a cat, batting a plastic ball on a string?

What about the rest of us sweaty proletarians, lumbering around in an ungainly manner? Not so shiny and pretty now, is it?

I won’t lie to you, friends, my sports bra heralds from leaner, sportier times. Times when I used to go running and do aerobics classes and, gasp, belonged to a gym! Circumferences have changed over the years, I haven’t seen fit to get measured for a new sports bra, because, until recently, the most athletic thing I've done these days is walk up some stairs at work. However, now I've started to leap around in the mornings to Joe Wicks, I find that I have to wear that ancient piece of restrictive lingerie (the sports bra) and it leaves an ugly red ridge around my torso. It cuts in something chronic but I can’t not wear one - wearing a normal bra means that the aerodynamics are all wrong. I won’t go into details other than it proved too distracting for the other poor members of my family, so the next day I turned up in full gear - running shorts, singlet and armour plated, ugliest-garment-in-the-history-of-garments, sports bra. 

But it’s not about what I looked like, right, it’s about how the exercise made me feel. And how did it make me feel? On the first day, brilliant. Subsequent days, quite good but perhaps not so good and also quite ashamed - ashamed of being terrible at squats and push-ups and planks, but also entertaining the rather optimistic hope of coming out the end of it as a master of all these things - the plank queen! All hail The Queen of Planks!!

Green Eyed monster

We need to talk about ‘Just Dance’, ‘Let’s Dance’, ‘Time to dance’ or whatever the bland, forgettable name of this game (on the PS 4 and many other platforms) is. It should be the most fun thing ever and it sort of is. Sort of.  But it also isn’t and, for me, this is because of the competitive element of it. Dearest reader, something strange has happened - my husband, who I’m sure he won’t mind me saying, is not an amazing dancer*, is really good at ‘Just Dance’ and keeps beating me at it. It’s not that I mind being beaten (much) it’s more that I just want to enjoy the music and move without being judged on how well I’m completing the moves. Just let me dance, Just Dance, just let me dance!
* Update - he does mind me saying!

It’s not just that though, that’s not my only niggle. As I sat there the other night, watching a play on my laptop, like the true intellectual I am, my husband wiggled his neat, compact little bottom to a Shania Twain song, right in front of me. 

Husband - getting his groove on!

Oh no, I thought, he’s going to emerge at the end of this period of isolation, social distancing, whatever, looking all buff and hot and hench and I am going to look like the librarian from the Blade film franchise!

Day 91 of self-isolation

He’s leaving me behind! This just will not do. This is the true ugly side of exercise, the unattractive, insecure, competitive side of it! 

Try it at your peril.

The Isolation Diaries

Dear Reader,

It's been a while, hasn't it? I couldn't write anything for a long time for personal reasons and then there was - well, you know, the thing we're all going through at the moment - pandemic, social isolation, lock-down. 

Like most people, the whole situation drove fear into my heart. All this talk of virtual museum tours and binge watching box sets on Netflix did nothing to allay my fears of the suffocating feeling of being buried alive. BUT, but it hasn't been quite as bad as I feared. I do realise that I'm lucky - I have my family around me and, although we don't have a proper garden, we have been able to get out to the park most days, for a good old, 2 metres away from other zombies, walk. We have enough to eat, (fingers crossed) we are well and my husband and I are able to work from home. So I do realise how fortunate we are, compared to others.

What have I done in these isolated times? I haven't learned a language, taught myself how to make origami animals or cleared out any junk but I have kept the wolves at bay by keeping (a little bit) busy. So here is a mainly visual diary of the last few days:

Cooking

I've been doing far more of it - not particularly photogenic stuff but a vegetable curry, a Bolognese and some soup. My husband made bread the other day which looked and tasted amazing but he can put a picture of that in his own blog! Here is my soup:

That soup had everything in it - lentils, roasted red peppers, smoked paprika, vegetable bouillon, onion (of course!). My kids are quite fussy eaters but they will eat most things if they've been blended into an unrecognisable mush so the soup was a 2 day, resounding success. Shame I didn't do that for the Bolognese or curry really...Anyway, I've got us on wartime rations* and as a consequence I am permanently hungry but I do find that I'm appreciating the taste of things much ore so perhaps after a few weeks of this the children will be begging for some of  that vegetable curry...

*Please be assured that I'm not starving my children - everyone has enough to eat, snacks are factored in - both healthy and 'unhealthy' but I felt the need to impose some kind of regime in order to stop the constant bird squawk of 'I'm hungry!' - Me, this is mostly me doing the squawking! :)

Exercise

The aforementioned almost daily walks to the park, we are very lucky to live within walking distance of this. The kids don't appreciate this yet but maybe they will:

A deer - self isolating

We've also been doing daily P.E with the lovely Joe Wicks:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyCLoPd4VxBvQafyve889qVcPxYEjdSTl

It's really hard! My poor, dough-like body doesn't know what's hit it. Squats, planks, press-ups, lunges! Do you know what though, I started off this week crying in bed while my husband tried to give me a 'we can do this' pep talk, and I felt way, way better after the first exercise sesh with Mr. Wicks. I can't be cynical about this, it 's brilliant! I can't do half of the moves and stand there marching on the spot while the others contort, at certain points, but better than doing nothing, right.

Home hairdressing

Yeah, it was only a matter of time really. I had vowed never to cut my own hair. Ever since that terrible time when, aged thirteen, I had hacked around with my fringe so much and it got shorter and shorter and more crooked so I decided it would be a good idea simply to cut it off completely. I ended up pulling the hair forward from further back and it looked truly, truly vile. I had the obligatory '80s mullet at the time too so those were NOT good hair days. I'm never cutting my own hair again, was my resolution and I mostly stuck to it. I'm afraid that I ruined my daughter's hair, when she was a toddler, so I vowed not to touch the kids' barnets either and I've stuck to that. However, that hasn't stopped me experimenting with colour...and er, I've dyed my hair pink:

Note to self - put makeup on next time you post a picture!

I feel a little bit 'My little Pony' but the next time you see me it'll have grown out so not to worry, eh. 

So reader, I hope you are keeping well, do feel free to leave a comment. Let's do a video call at some point, yeah, because it would be nice to see your lovely face. xxx