Stepping up

Today’s walk was up and around my local hill. We walked up to the park along horizontal and then steep sections. We had a look round, sat on a bench for a while, then we carried on and walked further than we did before.

Clearly I’m not doing this because it’s part of my life. I don’t need to walk to collect water or food. But I’m doing it for my health, a first world problem.

Anyway it’s more than I’ve done for a year and it’s got to be good for my heart. I now need to build up my distances safely, because after suffering a pulled calf muscle I don’t want to do that again!

Today’s uphill walk

The last three days we have done mainly flat walks, but today my hubby and I decided to climb up our hill. We need to get more heart points on my phone and the best way to do that was trying to walk up the hilly side streets in the area. It also got us away from the traffic on the main road. There are some streets that go up, and some across, so by walking up, then along, I managed to keep the pressure off my calf muscle that sometimes gets really tight after I pulled it a year or so ago. Also hubby is not as young as he was so it gave us both a breather. Finally we reached a little park and sat for a few minutes looking over the view and enjoying the trees in the park. Then up again, to reach the main road at the top of the hill and along it’s crest, before taking another horizontal route to get to our road and a few more hundred steps steeply downhill. Four days in a row we have walked. My arm shakes and so we hold hands or he holds my arm. It’s good to be out and about.

How do I draw from imagination?

How do I draw from imagination? I talk and think my way through things, by describing how they should look in my mind or verbally helps to make me think more about details of the image I’m drawing.

For example, this drawing was based on a memory of my walks in a local park as a child. There were trees that seemed to have faced in them. They were probably Ash trees, they seemed to have long spidery branches with tipped up ends like fingers. The path wandered around past stone walls that I used to balance on. Behind me was a play area with a slide, swings and a roundabout and seesaw. This is a memory drawing so it isn’t exactly accurate and things have probably changed a lot. I haven’t been back for years. But the face in the tree gives me a bit of a feeling of nervousness I used to get as a child.

Mystery singing

Singing in a bandstand is good because the roof helps the acoustics. Our group, called the Mystery Singers were out in the cold fog singing carols mainly to the empty park, although we did have a small audience. One group that totally ignored us was the local anti-vax group (or maybe the bah-humbug group). Very strange. They didn’t look happy.

At one stage the sun did come out and the temperature rose a few degrees but after a couple of songs the fog rolled back in again. I think people enjoyed our singing, we got some nice comments and applause. Now I’m warming up, it was freezing out there !

I remember a tree

I remember a tree that seemed to have a face, and used to scare me when I was a child. There were knot holes where branches had broken off that looked like a face. I remember watching the Wizard of Oz and seeing the wicked witch. For some reason the tree and the witch were linked in my mind. I know I used to walk home through the park sometimes, but I wouldn’t go down that path if it was getting dark.. I also remember walking on the top of an old stone wall, balancing on the top of it, pretending to be a gymnast…. This was over forty years ago. When I look at photos of the park it has a lot more civilised appearance!

Dancing leaves

Of all the seasons I remember autumn’s the most. Walking in the ark as a child, kicking my legs through piles of dry leaves, or slashing in puddles of water with soggy leaves sticking to my wellies. Looking at faces in gnarled trees, seeing if I could see Halloween witches. Sitting under the remaining few leaves of a weeping willow. Wondering when it would be clothed again. Time then was slow. Six months took a year….

At the boating lake

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My hubby went out with his remote control boat today. He took it to the boating lake in the park. This park is beautifully tended with floral borders and a restored boat house.

I wish I’d gone, but I was busy sorting things out as we are having to get a new washing machine. The old one has finally given up. The thing works but it keeps coming up with error messages. E8, E9. Don’t know what they mean but it’s stopping it finishing the programmes. I can only get it to work on one, 30 minutes 30 degrees…

But what’s this got to do with parks? Only that I didn’t go on a walk. They did about ten miles. I wish I was fit enough to do it. Humph!

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Quiet, like a Sunday….

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I wrote a long piece about this, then I fell asleep, my finger hit the screen and I’ve lost it! I will try and remember what I was saying.

I was bought up in the 60’s and 70’s, when shops closed on a Sunday, people bought enough food to last and put it in the pantry (a small room lined with shelves which was stacked with tins and dry goods).

It was quiet, no one had cars so we would play in the back garden or go to the local park which was a few hundred yards away over the main road. But the road was easy to cross because it wasn’t that busy.

Back to today. I sat in the garden and was surprised to hear birds singing. I think I could recognise about three different songs. They were up a tree at the other end of the garden, normally they would have been drowned out by the road.

Even the rush hour failed to happen. Normally the cars queue on the street waiting to turn into the traffic. Today, one car every few minutes.

The only thing I saw which was wrong was three young men, full of energy, walking together laughing, making fun, striding out. We have been told not to be in groups of more than two. I just worry…

Still, it’s quiet, like an old fashioned Sunday.

Sitting in a park

‘what is life, if full of care, we have no time to stop and stare’

W. H. Davies

Today has been lovely, we went out to see an exhibition and decided to stop and have an ice cream in the park. The sun was shining and it was just nicely warm, there was a sensory garden with large leaved plants and seed heads, the sky was dotted with fair weather clouds and the Rowan trees were full of berries. Dogs were barking off in the distance. The world was just right. I closed my eyes and suddenly I felt like I had been transported to my childhood. It was the 1960’s again before I knew about politics and anger, before I has heard of wars and revenge. I relaxed! Like a sunny Sunday afternoon in the park I played in as a child. No thought of what I have to do next. No time constraints. No I’ve got to be somewhere now. Wonderful.

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