Movement

I’ve found through a bit of research that it’s important to keep moving if you have Parkinsons disease. So I wobble and shake my way along to the shops or to the pharmacy and back. Trying to get my slow steps in. I have looked at my movement counter but although I’m almost always getting a couple of thousand of steps in every day my heart rate barely registers!

What to do? Then someone from my surgery suggested a Parkinsons group that does table tennis (ping pong). I’d played this on the dining table at home as a young teenager and thought I’d have a go. My worker from the surgery came down to introduce me to the group a week ago. I needed that support because I find it hard to integrate with new people because of anxiety.

So..  I went, and found that I can hit a ping pong ball across a net! I was getting my feet tangled a bit and sort of felt rather static. But I could do it. I went back this week and I’m happy I can progress. I’m going to keep going. It’s only a fortnightly thing, but I hope it will be good for me. I ache in places I didn’t know I have though!

Breakfast

What are your morning rituals? What does the first hour of your day look like?

The excitement of porridge

The joy of tablets

A cool shower

If I can afford it

Trying to get dressed

Without getting tangled

Feed the cats

Work out what I can do today

It all takes time.

Wobbly arms and leg

Don’t help my balance

Feel like I’m moaning again

Let’s just go back

To bed…..

Blue and yellow on my mind

Sunflowers and blue leaves, abstract pattern. Waiting for a resolution, no sign of peace or compromise. Women and children, old men and women try to escape. But their routes are snared with artillery and arms. Meanwhile the world waits for what? Who can guess… Time flies, slowly. Only a few days feels like a month of Sundays. I’m starting to avoid the news. So bleak. So much pain but so much bravery. My country? Keeping refugees out! Talking about security breaches instead of desperate humanity. Bean counters. May they be told to help instead of hindering. Me.. I’m just sad and confused.

Russian vine

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I don’t have a photo, but this afternoon we removed what feels like miles of Russian vine from our hedge. I think it’s also called mile a minute. It’s also growing at the back of our garden, and bits of it have grown up the telephone wires and even into our shed!

It was hot outside, so we worked in the late afternoon as it started to cool down. The Russian vine is wraping itself round a couple of leylandii, up an old willow tree, into our walnut tree, and around the Holly tree. It’s tough stuff. We should dig out the roots, but it’s too entangled. So we are cutting through the largest vines, then you pull at it, and strands of vine twenty foot long come out of the hedge. Each vine splits into branching thinner pieces. The leaves are green and heart shaped. It looks like a nice plant when you get it. With small white bunches of flowers in the summer. The bees like it, but our privet hedge flowers and that is more pleasant than the vine.

Unless you have a massive garden don’t grow it!