Flitting

By this coming Sunday, I will have been on holiday for eight weeks exactly -and out of those eight weeks, I will have spent precisely two weeks and four days in Birmingham. I don’t regret spending the time as I have done, thankfully, but it has left me rather wondering when I will simply be able to down sticks and just be. It makes me think of when I was at school, especially, and got increasingly annoyed with my parents for taking us away every single holiday – for which I should be grateful, I know, and in many ways I am. It just did mean that we never had any time to relax at home. See previous post, etc etc.

So anyhow, this is a long and convoluted way of explaining that I have just been in the south of France for a week, that tomorrow I am travelling north to visit J, and that on Saturday I will be taking a train down in the opposite direction to go to H’s big family gathering as a university friend and Maths girly. And then I’ll be home for a few days. And then I’m being driven to Durham with various furniture bits. And then, hopefully, I will have a September where I don’t leave Birmingham for a single moment, and it will be glorious, and sewing-ful, and I can get bored to my heart’s content! I might even remember to post photos of the all of the as-yet-undocumented garments. Pigs might fly indeed.

For today though I am home, sitting in my room, on my laptop, having a full night’s sleep on my most wonderful mattress in the world :-)

Day Whatever The Hell It Is Now

….because I really can’t be bothered to work it out at this time of night.

It must be so frustrating to have Parkinson’s. Turns out that accurate tracing with shaking hands is nigh-on impossible, but at least I have the consolation that I know what’s causing it and that it might go away someday (soon?). On the plus-side, though, today has been OK. Not quite a Day 27 (as it shall henceforth be known), but an OK-verging-on-good day nonetheless. Which is nice.

x

I’ve just returned from Shropshire, where my family and I spent a few days over New Year. Rather pretty, to say the least :-)

[photos to follow when I've the energy to upload them. But they are pretty, I promise!]

Hodie

What represents Christmas for you?

For me, it would have to be Benjamin Britten’s ‘Ceremony of Carols’. I listened to it earlier for the first time this year, and for the first time it felt vaguely like December 22nd. It’s beautiful, it really is.

Plan For The Week

This week is going to be spent tying up loose ends, so to speak. Getting my hair cut and (more importantly) thinned. Going to the chiropractor. Cashing in a prescription. Seeing the one or two friends who are still about. Playing the Kegelstatt Trio (and no doubt discovering just how out of practice I am!). Sorting out a mound of clarinet music, not to mention a large pile of receipts. Getting to the rag market if I have time after trying to finish my final garment for the summer.

Going through the Choral Soc treasury folder and printing off the auditions rota – weird to think that I am no longer the scared, overwhelmed, flu-ridden fresher, but the one to be showing people in and assessing their singing/ sight-reading skills!*

Emails, urgh. I’ve reached my storage limit on the university server and despite my best efforts at rationalising as I go along, my inbox is in a complete mess. Does your place send out tens of the damn things every day as well? Yeh, thought so. I think that takes priority over my laptop’s hard-drive, also long in need of rationalisation – that will have to wait for another year, probably.

Sorting out my third-year module choices, preferably before I have to start attending the lectures. This isn’t actually as crucial as it sounds – provided I haven’t missed anything, I can still change my mind up to October 31st or thereabouts, so it’s perfectly possible to hedge my bets and attend too many modules with a view to getting a better idea of what each involves. But it’d still be nice to be able to attack things with certainty. Maybe even doing some preliminary reading for the modules that I am certain on, although in all honesty that probably won’t happen, not least because I don’t have any of the books.

Packing. ParcelForce proofing and organising and delivering. Defending the number of clothes that I want to take up North, yes really! Repacking. Spending the last couple of nights in a room that looks too tidy and bare to be mine. Navigating the train journey from hell due to big engineering works on the line between Chesterfield and Sheffield.

Saying goodbye to Birmingham for ten weeks. Going from home (where hardly anyone has any concept of my university life) to university (where hardly anyone has any concept of my home life). Playing hunt-the-fellow-Midlander, a game that never gets old because success rates are so occasional and surprising. Meeting hordes of new people, and having to remember to be sociable.

Being with too-long-separated-from friends and housemates. Going back home :-)

x

*We’ll give them a grade. The range goes from A : “You’re a soprano and we’ve got too many sopranos but wow, you’re amazing, and there’s no way we’re not going to take you!” to E : “You’re a tenor, every choir in the country is desperate for tenors, but absolutely no way”

Boredom

Please let term start sooner than 8th October?

That is all.

Back to Basics

For those of you who don’t know, I have a back problem. It’s a relatively mild back problem, ’tis true, but it’s also a long-term back problem that doesn’t look set to go away any time in the near future. Some days I’m in constant pain from it. Some days I barely feel it at all, but I’m always, always conscious of it as a deciding factor in what I do or don’t do.

Gentle walking helps it. Long car journeys are painful, and I can’t go for longer than an hour at a time without a stretching and walking break. I cope in exams due to qualifying for the ‘physical needs special room’ where you get a stretching time allowance, but lectures can be another thing again*. Theatres and cinemas suck because you can’t even get up in the middle of a performance and the seats are generally horrendously unsupportive even with the aid of the faithful Irma.

I like supportive shoes, adjustable height objects in general, and stairs with an odd number of steps. I dislike most of the British bus network, having to duck to see round a corner in the Corsa that I drive, and stairs with an even number of steps.

But most of all I like Pilates. It’s not something I’d heard of before particularly (other than something which rich gym fanatics did down south), but it was recommended to me a year or so ago and after attending term-time Saturday morning classes with the Yoga Society, I simply haven’t looked back! It is a form of stretching, basically, which centres on balance and core stability. It is very controlled, breathing is important, and the real aim is to improve your overall flexibility – and it is undeniably true that while I always feel most supple just after a session, my whole posture has been transformed over the past year.

Like any exercise, however, you get out of shape if you don’t keep it up. I’ve been feeling pretty achy of late which is probably due to the cumulative effect of a tense, wet, house-bound summer**, so when a family friend mentioned that she had started attending classes at one of the local leisure centres, I figured that I might as well go along and see what it was like. And while I have my doubts about the finer points of the instruction – I would much rather go back to the Durham instructor who has, sadly, now moved away – I am sitting here feeling like something of a new person! Which isn’t bad for an hour’s stretching and £4.90 :-)

x

*, and after I clashed with the Health and Safety rules of the Maths Dept last year over the issue, something that I need to work out for the coming two years…

**, and a four-and-a-half-hour drive back from Derbyshire the other day. That is a ridiculous amount of time given the distance.

Hiatus

I am coming to the end of ten days spent in a place I love and am starting to call home, following five days in what is probably my favourite place in the world! What more can a girl ask for, really*?

*Answer: an internet connection, possibly, and slightly nicer circumstances to return home to. I am nabbing my housemate’s computer at the minute, so will post more and will catch up with you all hereafter :-)