Womad living

Home for the weekend at Womad 2017

Still managing to do some work though…well one of us is…colobusyeti busy photographing festival goers…me busy laying around.

Reconnecting…

The odd week I had stretched into another week. So now I am trying to reconnect. With myself, with my blog, with my work. This week we are away visiting friends and family back where we used to live before heading off to a festival. So I am hoping this break from all that surrounds and suffocates me will be the air I need to breathe again.

Sometimes I am so deep in my own company that I forget that I need other people. In the people that know me, who stay with me through all my ups and downs, I find reminders that I am more than me. I have a history, a life I have lived even if it has gone places or ways I never expected it to. They remind me to keep on living, to share myself with others.

I need that right now. I need taking out of this headspace and reminding that I am part of something bigger. That I am part of people’s lives. Last week it felt like this week was coming at the wrong time, that I couldn’t cope with all the people. I believe now that maybe it is coming at exactly the right time.

It’s oh so quiet…

Does it ever happen to you that you think you haven’t done something for a while and then you realise it is actually even longer than you thought? Happened to me today with this blog. Knew I hadn’t posted for a few days…but a week?! Oh my how did that happen…

To be honest its been a bit of an odd week. Something has simply not felt right. Not the usual over the top anxiousness or the sad depression that sometimes still hits me. This was more an absence. A feeling of not being quite here. Of detachment.

Everyone has their own way of dealing with their dark moments. I have a few. My main one is to switch off. I shut down and step away. Let whatever is up with me pass. Usually it is quite a conscious decision, this time though it kinda felt outside of my choice. Still I went with it, had an absent few days and now feel like a little more of me is back.

So an odd week as I said. My mental health can still throw me a curveball after all these years of living with its ups and downs. What is it trying to tell me this time?

Writing my list for living…

First of all let me say wow. Let me say thank you for all the wonderful responses to my post ‘the life in your years’. Clicking that publish button was seriously hard. The response I got here and on social media made all the doubts and tears rolled up in that post more than worth it.

Did you wonder if I would actually write my list for living? I know I did. Yet I have. It has moved from a hey-that-is something-I-ought-to-do kind of idea into more than an idea. My list has life.

I wanted to share it with you, partly so you knew I hadn’t forgotten about it. Partly to make sure I stuck to it. Partly to encourage those of you who said to me how much they shared or understood the feelings in that blog post and the need to live this life.

So here is my list so far, be gentle with it as it is still quite young and has space still to grow. And then grow some more. Like me.

As they say on Strictly Coming Dancing, in no particular order…

MY LIST FOR LIVING:

visit the very tip of the Mull of Galloway

buy some posh vegan cheese

go on a Segway

try painting

go on a Buddhist retreat or course

go snorkelling

climb a mountain (a small one…)

try pottery

ride a horse

go snowboarding

see a volcano

do our road trip across US

go sea kayaking

publish my own book of photos

Once I make the move to my own self-hosted site (coming soon!) , my list will have its own section where I can add to it, tick things off and see where it takes me. Join me and lets live this life together.

Photo from Pixabay

 

Vegan cakes in the Lakes

Are you a city person or more at home in the countryside? Last week I got to go from my home in rural Cumbria down to London for the night and then back up for a night in remote Lake District. Talk about contrasts!

The trip down to London was a whistle-stop visit to see Adele at Wembley Stadium with my mum (potentially amongst the last people to see her perform live as she cancelled the two remaining nights after ours!). Whilst I’m not her biggest fan, Adele can certainly belt out a tune with her voice and her interaction with the crowd is some of the best I have seen. Plus my mum was happy so that for me = time well spent.

Being in London is odd for me now. Being a south-eastern girl, I used to visit London all the time. It felt comfortable. Now it is quite alien and uncomfortable. And I’m not quite sure why. I don’t think it is the current countryside living I am indulging in. I felt this way about London when I returned back from our travels. London has changed for me.

Whatever the reason underlying this odd unhappiness with London, I was relieved to be away from it again (though it was lovely to see my little mum!). Excited too as we were heading to my first vegan festival the next day and a night away in our little camper – always one of my most favourite things to do.

Cumbria Vegan Festival was a bit of a mixed bag for me. There was so much tasty food there to try. I had my first experience of jerk tofu, pulled jackfruit and a vegan meringue that was utterly amazing. Too amazing. It is seriously a good thing I don’t live near the bakery. This was all good. Thing was though if you don’t have much money to spend, there was not much else there. A few talks and films showing and that was pretty much it. I was kinda hoping for more advice and information on the vegan lifestyle. Paying an entry fee to then just buy things seems-well-a-little-rubbish to me. Maybe I expect a little too much.

The good news was that the shop in the centre has an amazing selection of beers including the Samuel Smith brewery which does vegan beers! So we stocked up and then set off for Haweswater Reservoir on the edge of the Lake District. Bumping along single track roads in search of a spot to spend the night reminded me so much of our travels in Scotland as part of our Big Adventure – oh I want to do that again! We had hoped being a little cut off from the rest of the Lakes would mean it wouldn’t be so busy there. We were wrong.

Thanks to a little bit of patience and some fast manoeuvring, we got ourselves a perfect little spot overlooking the reservoir tucked at the end of the valley. Once the walkers (people who were walking the fells not the undead I hasten to add) had cleared off, peace and isolation reigned. And the weather rained.

Tucked up in our cosy little home, this didn’t seem to matter and we chatted the evening away over our beers. We woke up to spells of sunshine and people arriving to enjoy the hills by foot, bike, 4×4 and motorbike (some nutters even turned up at 4am!) as we packed up and headed home.

Strolling up the hill/mountain/steep thing behind our camper was the perfect antidote to the unease of being in London and gave the perfect opportunity to take some more Haggis and Horse photos too. I regret that it has taken us till now, when our time here is running out, to explore and sleep more in our little house on wheels.