Bear or Gecko?

I am sitting here at my desk, in my apricot coloured office, with Radio 4 burbling gently behind me and the rain drumming its own beat outside. Oh rain, I'm so pleased to see you! For a spiritual bear like me (some people are spiritual geckos, some are spiritual bears), yesterdays 30+ degree heat was just...like some awful 3rd rate sci-fi hellscape. With chirpy neighbours who are more gecko than bear. 

"I just love this heat, don't you mate?"
"Oh yes mate. A real treat. I'm going to mow the lawn and chainsaw a tree. See ya mate."
"Good luck mate, I'll be here pointlessly hammering nails into bits of wood."
"Good on ya mate."*

There is a strict routine to days like that: in the morning, the blinds and windows at the back of the house are flown open to allow as much (relatively) fresh and cool air in as possible. By midday, those are resolutely closed and the ones at the front of the house have been opened instead. 

The cats find new hiding places to escape the heat. The Great Boo is under the trailing spider plant, enjoying the cool green shade of the beast. Tiny Wee Mabel seeks out shrubs to sleep away her day underneath, coming in at night to lie on the beds, shedding dried earth and dead insects from her fur. 

I look in the fridge like a helpless infant turning to its mother for food. Why have the contents not converted themselves into nutritious salads and refreshing iced teas while the door has been closed? Does this mean I have to do it? N is no help on these days as he will happily eat cereal twice a day when it's hot, like an overgrown student. Which I suppose he is now.

Any allotment visiting takes place strictly before 8am where a short burst of watering, fretting over mysterious holes in the sunflower leaves, weeding and harvesting of an onion or two, plus a quick pick of sweet peas may take place. I can hear the rattle of the heavy chain and lock that keeps the gates closed, repeatedly clanging as people race against the temperature clock. 

"Don't lock it!"
"Sorry! Think we're all up here, aren't we?"
"Can't stop, I've got 5 minutes to water everything while the kids eat breakfast!"
"Don't shut the gate!"

"Wait for me!"

The only other time it's this busy is on a Sunday morning where we can linger over Thermos's of coffee and commiserate over bindweed. There is not the time at 7.30 on a Friday: we rush in, sending dog walkers - on the same early morning mission - scattering in surprise. It's like the rush for an IKEA sale, without the tea lights and meatballs. 

At some point, I manage 10 minutes of yoga and realise that, along with all the usual places, my eyebrows are sweating. Eyebrows! I didn't even know they could do that! So I ditch out of the 4th downward dog in favour for practising shavasana - corpse pose. Apologies to the plucky tiny Texan teaching us all via YouTube but my inner bear wants shavasana, preferably on the cool tiles of the kitchen floor, a la the Great Boo. 

Another mournful gaze into the fridge fails to automatically muster up a peach, mint, bulgar wheat and feta salad with pomegranate molasses dressing, or even the ingredients for one, so I eat cheese on crackerbread and then retire for a nap on the sofa, the coolest spot in the house, waking an hour later with only the vaguest of notions where I am. 

Coolest apart from the hallway but I've not yet been forced to camp in there. Give me time. 

I've recklessly promised a friend I will go along to her preview show, so I pack sandwiches (the last time I went to any kind of exhibition preview, the promised 'dry snacks'** turned out to be packets of Walkers crisps. I am not falling for that trick again), bottles of water and wet flannels into a bag packed with ice blocks. I pack the friend foolish enough to say she'd come along. And we head out for a 50 minute journey down the M5 with broken air conditioning. 

***

As the mini Magnums are wilting on their slushy bed of ice, people are eschewing sticky backed hugs in favour of air kisses that land wide of their marks. Carefully designed 'Become a Patron' flyers are crumpled with use as fans and sticky from use as cocktail coasters. Faces are flushed and shirts are damp but the preview is a success, which is all that matters. 

I stay up talking with N, who'd been to the Gardeners World show for the day (the day! I'd have lasted an hour and probably tried to push Monty Don into a pond in my heat-induced fury), till 1am, neither of us able to sleep in heat that lies like a blanket. We drink cold white wine, eat Pringles, from our seats on the floor, the coolest part of the house. Tiny Wee Mabel comes in and announces, loudly, that she is going upstairs to sleep and scatter debris on a duvet after her long day of sleeping. Great Boo sits silently by his bowl, hoping that mute appeal will win him a second helping of supper biscuits. 

At last, although sleeping downstairs on the floor comes in for serious consideration, I remember that TWM brought a mouse in last week, and I don't much want to wake up next to a rodent corpse, I haul my heat-heavy carcass off to bed. One day, I promise myself, one day I will crack this heat thing and I will learn to love the weighty days of summer. One day I will have the right clothes, the right body, the right attitude, the right eyebrows that don't sweat. 

But right now, there's an ice block chilling my bed and calling my name. 

*neither of these people are Australian, they just feel the need to express themselves like they are. Ah yeah no, mate.
**seriously. The preview invite said "one drink and dry snacks will be available". I have never felt more invited

*** the allotment (the nice bits) at 7.30 yesterday morning. I will allow that hot summer mornings are something special

Getting In My Own Way

Surprised everyone I know when I took up yoga a couple of years ago, not least myself because I'd always assumed that as a curvier (insert own adjective and then burn it) person, all I would do is sweat a lot and embarrass myself in front of the thin, lathe-like yoga bunnies. And that I would get in my own way. 

Turns out I was right on 2 counts. 

I do sweat a lot and parts of me get in my own way but I'm never embarrassed. Everyone is too busy trying to get themselves into the same damned pose whilst worrying about farting/smelling sweaty/falling over. Yes, even the lathe-like ones. They have gut microbes too, people.

Even so, I couldn't help thinking that to fail to sit up very straight seems like kind of an epic fail. Except that I did a one-armed side plank later that evening, so nuts to that kind of thinking. 

Also, it was too damn hot. Why does yoga man never put his fans on? Does he secretly hate us? Or have a mutated genetic thingie that means he never sweats? I shall watch more closely next time to make sure he blinks...if I can keep my glasses on. Last time they slid all the way down my sweaty nose and landed with a sad thunk on the floor.

There has to be a beginning

In this case, a slightly delayed one as the post I tried posting twice over the weekend did most emphatically not want to and it was too hot to make it behave like a blog and not a recalitrant teenager.

So here we are. This is not my first time blogging. I ran one for years that closed simply because the weight of the situation I was living in felt like it was too much to allow me to write freely. We will see if this new situation does.

But I am tired, oh so tired, of how social media is so damn polarised. Micro-blogging isn't satisfying and Twitter threads are annoying. Also, it's getting harder and harder to find the good news in anything or the reasoned voice or the nuanced debate. It's all shouting and no platforming and seeing how controversial you can be just for the sheer "likes" of it. 

I don't likes it. If I want ranting and irrational screaming into the void, I'll stop taking my hormones and wait for the fact no one ever puts a glass in the fucking dishwasher to become overwhelming. As my boyfriend would say, hold my pint. 

So this blog is very firmly about the good and real and positive in the world, because I am in a place where good and positive things are happening (glasses/dishwashers aside), so I want to share it. My mental and physical health are better than they've ever been, just in time for the menopause, and I have the best walk into work ever.

 

  
We goes along the canal which is mostly calm and peaceful. The houseboats are starting to line the bank: collie dogs and terriers jump off as they moor and start chasing each other, there is a smell of bacon frying and the gentle sounds of a couple rowing over who did the most work at the locks..."If you can't cope now Sandra, how will you manage when we get to Birmingham?"

In the picture above, behind the row of trees, is my allotment. Waited 2 years for that to become available and then started the moving house process pretty much as soon as the paperwork was signed. Safe to say, not much has been done there yet bar sticking some membrane over the beds and strimming the wild patch.

But it is my long-awaited allotment on which I will grow raspberries and small fruit trees and flowers and you know, stuff. Plus, it's a 5 minute walk from the new house and is right next to the nature reserve as well as the canal. The reserve is rather splendid with orchids, foxes and badgers, slow worms and butterflies. There was a homeless man camping there for a little while but he seems to have gone now. I hope he has a house of his own too.


Then we go past the bus depot wall which has a pleasingly rusty, weather-worn surface. Eaten away by time and oxidisation (now isn't that a good word to say?), it's exactly the sort of wall that the Smiths would have posed in front of for an album cover before Morrissey became too, well, Morrissey.

So now, for the final stretch, I have This Charming Man playing in my head, looping the chorus over and over like a stuck piece of vinyl. Until I look up. 

The duck has something important to tell you: "Pause the shouting, settle on down and let the good stuff roll over you." 

At least, I'm sure that's what he would have told you if duck bills were engineered to say things like that. As it was I didn't ask, merely nodded and moved on after the shot, promising that this will be a blog free of nasty things. Let him contemplate all he surveyed while I crossed the bridge and made my way past Asda. Which is unphotogenic and nasty, so I didn't photograph that.


What I am reading this week: Case Histories by Kate Atkinson. There is a new Jackson Brodie book due out soon, so I'm rereading. The woman is juggling so many plots, it's making my head spin (in a good way) and there's nary a wobble in any of them.

What I'm watching: the Women's World Cup. Turns out I don't hate football after all. 

What I'm listening to: The System Only Dreams in Darkness by The National. Earworm courtesy of the Boyfriend. Also watched the Stormzy set at Glastonbury. That was something else. 

What I have been doing: yoga. Specifically a return to a proper class. It kicked my butt, oh me of "I've only got 15 mins, that'll do" home practise.