It’s happened – I’ve finally run out of interesting and distracting things to do and have resorted to clearing out kitchen cupboards. There’s something in the air and I can no longer resist it. I’m sure I can do it without Marie Kondo’s help though and, really, how much is there in a kitchen cupboard…
Animals exercising their right to roam
I’m not a great fan of the news in general. It’s usually bad, frequently reflects editorial decisions I wouldn’t have made and is extremely repetitive. It’s also highly addictive, which is why I treat it somewhat like alcohol – fine in small doses, but leading to mental and physical breakdown if strict limits aren’t applied….
To travel mindfully as well as hopefully
When people ask me what I’m doing these days, my first reaction is to say “Well, what is anyone doing?” But I have realised that this is not the right answer and most people have a much more impressive list of achievements than I do. I hear tales of immaculate gardens, painfully clean houses and…
The three stages of lockdown life
Now that we’ve lived through nearly four weeks of lockdown, and with a few more still to come, I’ve started to think that lockdown life follows a pattern, with three distinct stages. Quite a few of us started out thinking that it would be rather nice to spend some productive time at home, but I…
The dark recesses of the lockdown larder
The recent worry over food shortages led me to take a good look at the food we have lurking in dark forgotten corners of our pantry. I love having a pantry, it makes me think that we’re living in the 1950s, the sunny Enid Blyton version and not the Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 version. Definitely…
View from inside
What are we doing with ourselves now that we can’t while away the time in cafés and shops? Have we embarked on a strict project of self-improvement? Have we joined Gareth Malone’s online national choir so that we can frighten the cat with an off-key version of Elton John’s I’m Still Standing? Or are we…
The birds are winning
My tai chi classes have been cancelled so I am now practising in the garden and I can’t get over how peaceful it is. Normally, the planes are zooming endlessly overhead and there is a constant drone of traffic noise from the nearby A4. I’d become so accustomed to this background noise that I barely…
Time out
I don’t mean to downplay the seriousness of the problems that the world is now facing, but even the worst situations can have their compensations. There are those who are quite looking forward to cancelling all their diary commitments and cocooning at home. Of course this will present challenges, mostly in the form of other…
The lure of daytime television
I have recently been watching an awful lot of daytime television. Not by choice, you understand. My father has been staying with us and TV has featured prominently. I had optimistically thought that I would read a book, serene and undisturbed, while all of this was going on in the background. But, predictably, that isn’t…
Anyone for a later-life crisis?
Everyone is familiar with the mid-life crisis, but I don’t think I’ve heard anyone talking about a crisis occurring in later life. Surely this must be fairly common among the newly retired? Retirement is such an enormous change in people’s lives, a period of great adjustment and re-imagining. We are entitled to a crisis of…