may round up
Well goodbye May, you have been… absolutely everything! There have been tears, there has been unparalleled joy, there has been anxiety and despair.
Have you been baking sourdough? Have you been doing Zooms quizzes? If you could tell your past self these and all the other bits of our current reality would you be shocked?! I have baked a disaster of a sourdough and am all over the zoom. How much the world has changed in the past 10 weeks, do you think this has changed us for the better? For me it has brought into focus what is important and good for my soul. One thing I know is that being in my head all the time is no good at all. I need to get into my body. Fun fact! I was a sports scholar at school so I knew all about that as running and snowboarding and playing team sports got me through some tricky teenage years but I had forgotten this through my 20's (although maybe dancing until the sun came up on nights out is the same thing?!)
Sensory onslaughts have taken me out of my thinking mind and into my body for most of my life so I have been doing HIIT, dragging my kids on uphill walks, even putting the car windows down on the motorway. Crazy.
May has been Mental Health Awareness month. As usual what has helped me the most are books. On that note…
What I read this month:
1. The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo
2. Waterlog by Roger Deakin
3. Prep by Curtis Sittenfield
4. Foraging for Wild Foods by David Squire
I hadn’t thought about it until I wrote it here but these four books sit in two very polar opposite categories. Claire Lombardo and Curtis Sittenfeld write characters in the most astonishing ways, the details and subtleties stay with you for a long time and the characters have become so visceral and real in my head I almost can’t believe that they are works of fiction. I always feel sad finishing books where I have really fallen for the characters and I did particularly in Claire Lombardo’s book.
I rarely read male authors but did two this month, both of which are non fiction. Both of which are homages to the natural world. Roger Deakin wrote Waterlog in the 90’s just as his marriage ended. Cold water helped him enormously with his mental health and he set out around the UK to swim in as many places as he could. He has all sorts of adventures in this book and describes the most beautiful ways in which people interact with swimming, visiting lidos which have been untouched since the 1930’s and dining in rivers by houses which fill up with water and have pictures on the walls of people cooking at their ovens in welly boots. It is quintessentially English. And also made me want to dive into the nearest cold water I could find. Which was exactly what I did as we had our first sea swim of the year last week.
David Squire’s book is all about foraging and I have taken it on all our walks on the South Downs way. We have covered a lot of the Sussex section of the SDW from the River Adur to Firle. The book has helped me find elderflower and wild garlic and educated me on so many other edible delights which grow wild in our meadows and forests and on the edge of river banks. Turns out you can eat dandelion leaves. Who knew?!
MONTHLY FAVOURITES
Turned Up Online for... My dear friend Polly has been running a very useful online course entitled Leads On Demand, which I did the branding and design for. I have learnt so much from it about funnels and creating content which appeals to your audience, all the digital marketing expertise you could possibly need as a freelancer. She also has a free facebook group with tons of advice.
Two websites I designed this month have launched in this past week. Peachy Living, a very lovely neighbour of mine who is a nutritional therapist and specialises in families and fussy eaters. The second is salt. which is a portfolio for June, who designs and supplies beautiful textile fabrics.
To lead on from my foraging chat above I have been checking Foraged by Fern (thanks for the tip, Jade!) for all the foraging tips.
Two documentaries I really loved this month are Given which is just mind blowingly beautiful, about a family travelling around the world narrated by the son who is looking for a Big Fish. The filming is stunning and it was bitter sweet to watch in a time of not being able to travel.
The second is The Motherload, a crowdsourced documentary. It is all about cycling and life on a cargo bike, a lot is shot around Fairfax in Marin America, where my mum lives. Again slightly bitter sweet as our bike was stolen recently. One of the purest joys I can think of is freewheeling on a bike by the sea.
From the documentary I took this quote which I feel so strongly at the moment: ‘Wildness reminds us what it means to be human, what we are connected to rather than what we are separate from’ (Williams 75).
