In these distraction-riddled times, it’s incredibly easy to not be earning any money.

Here’s a way to stop doing that.

This is a story about a part-time freelance writer (hi there) who found himself with lots of things he wanted to do, many of which didn’t help his fledgling career at all. He knew how to destroy the world so he could sit down and work – that wasn’t the problem. No, the thorn in his paw was that he never quite knew what he should be doing next.

So he made himself a bucket list.

Ah, bucket lists. Wonderful things. As the name suggests, these are imaginary receptacles that you sling everything into, willy-nilly. You add things to the end of them and you do the things at the top of them, crossing entries off with a different pen that has a nice thick nib so the line is sufficiently solid-looking. A permanent marker pen is great; it squeaks. The squeak of victory.

Here are my problems with bucket lists:

1. I list the easiest things.

2. Then I list the hardest things.

Easiest things: do the washing-up, order train tickets online, ring a friend, catch up on blog comments, read the latest at World Hum, oil the chain on my bike, go shopping…

Hardest things: finish my Radio 4 Afternoon Play pitch, get healthier, make $1m, win the Nobel peace prize, learn to dance, have a fulltime sustainable writing income, be adored by millions, etc.

And so here’s my experience of working through a bucket list: YAY! YAY! YAY! YAY! Oh.

Brick wall.

So then I cheat by changing the rules: I don’t have to do them in order. I can skip the tricky ones and do the others first. And so that’s what I do. And my life is suddenly in danger of being an inexhaustible series of easy wins, lined up in front of me, all the way to the horizon. To infinity and beyond.

But you feel busy. You feel dynamic. Yay yay YAY.

Generally, I bucket-think myself into long-term inactivity. Oh, sure, I’m getting stuff done, but it’s the easy, shallow stuff, not the jobs I know I really should be doing. Why? Because they’re usually too big to cross off.

One way round this is to break your big wins into little ones that will fit on your attention-deficient bucket list – but in doing so, you run the risk of treating them superficially, of always trying to hurry on to the next one. Goal-based living, see: it wears you out, turns you into a box-ticker, obsessed with achievement at the expense of experience. You don’t dig deep because the next thing is always on your mind because your list is still so damn long.

So then I tried prioritizing my list and stick to a rigid order.

1. [Important stuff].

2. [Slightly less important stuff].

………

48,962. Do the washing up

And this failed because I like the thrill of chaos and variety. I’m not a program – I’m a person. A thing designed to thrive on the different and the unexpected and the aimlessly fun. If I did nothing but the most important things, I’d feel shackled, unable to goof around and pick tasks creatively, on a whim. (Also, I’d have a lot of washing-up to do).

Cubicle-thinking, I call it.

So then I made myself a very strong coffee, got a big piece of paper and wrote lots of foul language all over it. This calmed me. Then I turned the paper over and scribbled a few ideas. One stuck.

And here it is. A better way to manage my bucket-brain. And my version is all about Money (the great enabler of Fun).

Here comes my train of thought. Please stand behind the yellow line, thank you.

1. I need to be doing 3 types of Stuff. (a) Stuff directly for Money, (b) Stuff indirectly for Money, and (c) Stuff almost certainly not for Money in any conceivable way.

2. Let’s call those Red (No Money), Amber (Some Money) and Green (YAY Money).

3. So now I take my precious, inadequate bucket list and I chop it up, scattering the contents into these three categories.

eg.

GREEN: Work on radio play idea; write freelance blog post for [online market]; pitch magazine article; work on book.

AMBER: Networking; research writing markets & job offers; vocation-related reading; work on blog’s SEO profile; planning travel; sitting in the garden, thinking hard about things.

RED: See how many Pringles I can fit into my mouth at one time without choking; reading purely for fun; watching season 6 of The Shield; going for a walk to see if I can get myself lost (which is the best way to explore your neighbourhood); hanging out with friends; sitting in the garden, thinking aimlessly about things.

4. When I’m done with chopping up my bucket list, I get three big pieces of paper. (They’re different colours).

5.  And I fill them.

6. Then (this is the tricky bit) I divide up my free time between Red, Amber and Green activities. Then I do only what’s on each of those lists within those designated parts of my day. I can switch between things or pick on a whim – but only within those limits.

This proportioning is the difficult bit. You have to be realistic. Need a complete day off? It’s all Red. Want to be super-productive? Push the proportion of Green and Amber up as far as you dare. And so on

The great thing is that all three lists should have roughly the same amount of things on them if I’m healthily focussed on my work. Too much on the Red list? Slacker, j’accuse. Nothing on the Green list? It seems you’ve been neglecting Amber, my friend. Nothing on Red? FUN IS FUTILE, NUMBER ONE. YOU WILL ALL BE ASSIMILATED. etc.

Right now, this productivity method suits me nicely. It’s bucket-listing, yet not. It’s prioritizing, yet not. Best of both worlds, yet not quite either.

Any of the above struck a chord with you?

Images: lanchongzi, wwarby, Doug88888, longhorndave and AlanCleaver_2000.

You may have clicked on this before. If so, you’d have rudely been told “The feed provider is too stupid to have e-mail subscriptions set up”, or something similar.

(Sorry).

(It works now).

There’s a lot of ways to travel these days.

I just can’t keep up with all the different  types of tourism and all the neologisms people have invented to describe things that are amply covered by existing words. (Take the arrival of “gocation”, the opposite of “staycation”. That one hurt).

However, I keep my ear to the ground.

Check these out. Next big thing, ‘kay?

It’s all the rage. It’s the ultimate macho way to camp. It’s CRAMPING (an elegant marriage of “crap” and “camping”).

Here’s a typical press release:

“Men! Ask yourself – does camping make me look manly? Answer – no. Nowadays any effete fool can fling up a dome tent or thread a guy rope through a bar-stitched point. They say it’s ‘for the best’. They say it’s ‘good’ to make camping easier. Easier? This is womanly thinking. Women want to humilate men, to rob them of their godgiven right to demonstrate brute strength and imply fecundity of the loins by accidentally hammering a tent peg through their foot (and similar indicators of masculinity).

And let’s not even begin with glamping, eh, guys?

So, modern camping. It’s wimpy. It’s wrong. It stops here. Gather round, men! There’s a new way, a better way to spend the night under canvas!

Picture this.

1) You arrive at campsite reception to be kept waiting for 2 hours, frustration furrowing your brow. Then you hand over an excessive amount of money for an ancient A-frame tent riddled with scabrous holes, galloping mould and perished rubber guys that explode under the puniest strain. Your woman will cling to you with horror at the sight of it! RAAAR! You are strong!

2)Then you’ll be led away by a surly, uncommunicative campsite  administrator to a patch of tractor-churned quagmire – your home for the night. Your guide will then wait to be tipped with whatever money you have left in your pockets and/or wallet.

3) But there’s more! Once you have succeeded in creating something analogous to a fully-pitched tent, a herd of Highland bulls will be herded into the vicinity with klaxons and smoke grenades.

4) Campsite staff will continue to keep things lively throughout the night with loud music, car headlights and refrigerated power-hoses played against the side of your dwelling, paying special attention to the patch of ground you’ll crawl over when you emerge in the morning. 

Optional extras: for a pre-arranged fee, game dogs will be encouraged to copulate against the tent wall / marksmen will attempt to shoot through guy ropes with ‘noisemaker’ rounds / local communities will assemble to sing “Kumbaya” and “The Happy Wanderer”, accompanied by a heavily amplified skiffle band.

Throughout, you will broadcast your mettle by remaining positive and confident that you’ll mentally and physically survive the night, despite the apparent evidence to the contrary.

You will be MAN.

Can you really afford to truly miss the ultimate gender-reinforcing holiday?”

Note: Unfortunately cramping has as yet failed to take a hold in the UK, as many campsites offer these services as standard for no additional fee.

If extreme travel just isn’t extreme enough for you…welcome to the exciting, dangerous world of BUNGEE CLIMBING!

“With an elasticated cord tethering you to the ground, attempt to scale obstacles without being plucked screaming off them! Test your mettle against climbing walls, enjoying the thrilling agony and panic of those last few feet. Then, if you survive, work your way up to local mountain peaks before saving up for the ultimate bungee-climbing experience – Everest, without oxygen and under massive tension!

Please note, we only recommend using an experienced bungee climbing team that can accurately judge the length of cord you’ll need for a both achievable and challenging climb. You may have read about recent (largely sensationalist) reports in the popular media of low-quality cords parting under high pressure, catapulting the shrieking climbers off the other side of the mountain. This is inflammatory and misleading. The air’s far too thin up there to make any real noise.”

Spurred on by the boom in “Eat Pray Love” tourism, here’s the next big thing…the ESL EXPERIENCE!

“Based on Lynn Truss’s popular grammar-busting book Eats Shoots And Leaves, the ESL Experience takes you around the world in a quest to find the world’s most obvious spelling mistakes.

For those seeking instant gratification, the Home Tour takes you round London and New York, kitting you out with a chauffeur-driven car, a megaphone, a spray-can and a large marker pen – everything you need to ridicule and correct spelling mistakes you find, whether on restaurant menus, shop signs, billboards or people’s clothing. (We can’t always guarantee the locals will respond favourably, but remember – bad spelling is a sign they’re ignorant, so it’s for their own good).

And for the more adventurous, take the Away Tour to learn a new language so you can use your new knowledge to belitte and correct an entirely different culture, making the world a better place!

Note: as other cultures can be less open-minded about their own grammar, your car will be armour-plated and your chauffeur will be ex-SAS.”

Note: oh blimey, it’s been done.

No full-length press release as yet for STEREOTOURISM (“Ever gone abroad and been disappointed that your smallminded prejudices about other cultures don’t fit reality? We’re here to help!”) or GEOCRASHING (“Smash your car into the side of a stranger’s house! It’s the fun new GPS-assisted real-world player-vs-player sensation from the team that brought you World Of Walmart“).

I’ll update you when I know more.

Images: Mike Miley,  maessive, Shahram Sharif, Steve Bullivant and Arturo de Albornoz.

Creative input:  @DaveHagerman, @serap_tweets, @thenotoriousmeg, @lazolounge, @cherilucas, @koangirl, @ieatmypigeon, @amybp, @TravelSavvyKayt and @nickelmoon.

For 10 years, York has been my home. Give it another year, and I’m hoping I’ll be gone.

(Don’t get me wrong now. I love the place. However….rest of the world, and all that).

Yet there’s much to see in York…

And here I am, a travel-writer in the making, living in one of the cultural highlights of the UK…and I don’t write about it. Not for publication, not into blog posts (not often, anyway), not here and not there. Nowhere.

Well, that strikes me as a bit daft.

Time that changed.

All photos: Mike Sowden.

“What are you talking about?”

I’m no stranger to that question, although it’s usually phrased in different ways such as “What the hell do you mean, Mike?”, “Are you aware you’re actually talking, as in Out Loud?” and “Please get to the point before one of us dies“.

But in blogging circles, it’s one of the Big Questions you need to answer before you commit fingers to keyboard. What’s your topic? What do you have to say? Why is it you that has to say it? How do you conquer the world?

Over the weekend, I provided a couch for a Professional Hobo to kip on. She’s a marvel. (More on that later). And she knows how to tackle the Big Questions, which is why she’s a successful location-independent writer – and a million other things besides. She knows exactly what she means. She’s always aware of what she’s saying. She knows how to get to the point.

And so over the last few days, I’ve been thinking about what my point is.

Regular readers (sorry – it always makes me giggle when I find myself writing that) will have noticed a change in my writing over the last 8 months. Prior to this year, I’ve been a green blogger, a crazy architecture blogger,  a writer of this and a blogger of that. I’ve peppered the Internet with words. But since January, I’ve shifted towards what I truly want to write about – and it’s not quite what I initially expected.

For the last few years in various corners of teh Interwebz, Fevered Mutterings has been a reflection of my interests as a fledgling professional writer – but it’s only recently become a travel blog. It’s a clumsy fit. Whenever I see Walmgate Bar here in York, I’m reminded of my blog at the moment. It’s sorta fun, but also a bit…inelegant. If you stand back, you can see the join.

The solution to this problem is obvious. I should move my travel-related writing elsewhere.

So that’s the plan.

A new site.

(Don’t worry. I’ll be keeping Fevered Mutterings as it was always intended to be – an outlet for the least coherent parts of my output. That won’t change. I love the sound of my own voice way too much for that).

…..

So, returning to my original point (because these days, I do indeed get to the point)…what the hell am I talking about?

If you go to my Travel archives and look under the heading “How and Why”, you’ll see that I’m not Nora Dunn or Christine Gilbert or Chris Guillebeau or Tim Ferriss or any of the other super-clued-up How To Get The Life You Want gang. I’m not going to be telling you the best way to become location-independent – or if I am, it’s by directly referencing these guys.  If you want to know the mechanics of long-term travel or becoming a digital nomad, these are the people you need to read. They have those answers.

In contrast, my thing is this, and this, and this (and this). It’s about seeing the world better.

Learning to look at the obvious things. The things so taken for granted that hardly anyone wastes breath discussing them. Not renegotiated, not argued or even considered – just…there.

How many of these assumptions are so self-evident they’re not even worth thinking about?

Traveling will improve your life.

The more photos you can take, the better your memory will be.

When we travel, we leave the Old Us behind.

English cooking is DREADFUL.

The more antiquated a travel experience, the more authentic it is.

Having less money makes you less generous.

The easier, the better.

English is the world’s first global language.

Locals always know what’s really going on.

You should always try to be objective about things.

Digital maps are much more useful than their analogue counterparts.

That’s what interests me most – because behind these things are hints at the Ultimate Questions of travel: why do we do it? What do we get from it? What do we hope to gain from it? What’s it for?

And all too often, we’ve buried these vital lines of inquiry behind things we never discuss because, well, duh, they’re obvious. (I mean, everyone knows photos aid memory. Except…well, maybe they don’t).

There are those who are asking such tricky questions, such as the marvellous Alain de Botton (can we really escape from our old selves when we travel?) or Eric Weiner (can happy places make me happy?). But I’ll hazard the opinion that generally, we’re still blundering around in the dark. Generally, we don’t think too much about it. We just do it. It’s just what we do.

For now, you’ll find me tackling this line of inquiry here, or (acceptance permitting) places like Brave New Traveler. But ultimately, and soon, it’ll be a whole new online venture.

So why would you want to come along for the ride?

I can’t guarantee I’ll help you organize your life better, or write a better blog, or sustainably hit the road in 6 months, never to return.

But I can help you look at things in a new way – the questions we never ask, the sights we never allow ourselves to see – and help you make your own mind up about them, unhindered by the myriad influences bombarding us from all sides. The aim is to approach everything with a healthy humility and a carefully crafted sense of ignorance (trust me, I’m big on this bit) – and enjoying a broader, deeper experience of the world as a result.

I probably can’t help you start your travels – but I can help you appreciate them better once you’re off.

So, I’ll keep you posted. There’ll be laughter (when I attempt to say something profound), there’ll be tears (when I attempt humour). But it might help you see the world a bit differently – and isn’t that what travel is all about?

That’s my point.

Thanks for waiting.

Images: JuditK, liber, helgabj and Mike Sowden.

I’m rubbish at learning languages. So for a language method to work, it has to be truly idiot-proof.

Here are the best two ways I’ve found of learning a new language – one obvious and therefore my idea, and the other so cunning I’d never have thought of it. (Thanks, Ian).

Both of them will ruin your home life and push you to the fringes of polite society.

But hey, you’ll know a new language at the end of it. Swings and roundabouts, eh?

1. Fake It

The first thing to realise about a foreign language is that it’s not English with different words. Deconstruct your chosen language to get a sense of how formidably different it is. Different words, yes, but also different thinking. That’s what language is: your country, turned into sounds. It’s culture in action. So if you learn the language, you make a massive step towards understanding the people who speak it.

This is why I hated Mariliyn vos Savant’s playful suggestion in one of her books that since learning other languages is a stretch, and since English dominates “global culture”, don’t bother with anything else. Wait until everything’s translated into English*.

Don’t do this. Not only is it thinly-veiled xenophobia, it’s wrong. Translations always leak meaning. Bad translations leak like colanders. They’ve lost their subtleties, their contexts, their rhythm and flow and beauty. They become crappy remakes.

Since languages are keys to unlock different ways of thinking, the best way to understand these new rules (hidden between the lines) are to live them. Move to another country, in other words. Desirable, fun…rarely practical.

So the next best thing?

Swap out parts of your life for their equivalent in another language.

Say it’s French. So – read French newspapers. Pick up books by French authors, in French. Have French radio on, playing French music interrupted by French news bulletins. Cook French food out of a French cookbook. Watch films and TV shows in French, undubbed. Stream French radio and podcasts over the internet. Read lots of French wine labels (thus forcing you to drink lots of French wine). Hang out with a French penpal, either via snail-mail or virtually. Have any French-speaking friends? Insist they do so, all the time.

In short – act French.

It’s like cultural roleplay – except you’re not an adult, you’re a child again. You’ll have to relearn the simplest things. Most of the time, you are simply not going to understand. At first, you’re lucky if you get the gist. It’ll be frustrating. Humiliating. You’ll feel like an idiot. But what you’re doing is getting the sounds and the rhythms and the feel of the language at work, deep into your head.

But of course it’ll all remain a meaningless babble without the equivalent of early schooling. (I recommend Pimsleur, myself). However,  beware of the danger of quarantining your learning inside your head, turning it into a mental reference book you plan to dip into occasionally. You don’t want that. You want it to be part of the way you think – instinctual, like your first language. And you’d never get that from going to school. It can’t be taught – only lived.

So live it.

2. Label It

Wouldn’t it be great if we were fitted with a kind of head-up display that translates the world into another language? You select “French mode”, look at a lampshade and the word abat-jour hovers above it, like a Terminator’s eye view (daft on machines, but great on humans). That would be seriously useful.

Well, here’s the low-tech equivalent.

Grab a few pads of PostIts and wander round your house with a Sharpie in one hand and a translation dictonary in the other. And label everything. Light switches. Windows. Furniture. Letterboxes. Junk mail. Packaged food. Garden tools. Pets. Family members. (Or even better, get your loved ones to wear jumpsuits with the parts of their bodies clearly labelled in another language. Tell them that they’d do it if they truly love you – that always works).

Weird? Sure. You’re a freak. However, you’re a freak with an unstoppable vocabulary in the language of your choice. Maybe you could live with that.

So I’m really sorry, current housemates. Your life is about to be swamped with Greek radio, Greek music, Greek newspapers, Greek food and Greek-labelled squares of yellow paper stuck to everything including, if I can get away with it, you. I’d apologize properly, except I’m too busy learning a new language.

Συγγνώμη, guys.

* Note: to her credit, vos Savant suggested this as a throwaway challenge-your-assumptions exercise in getting your priorities right. It’s not her official line on languages. But it’s stuck with me, mainly because I’ve met people who genuinely believe that English is the ultimate repository of all meaning. They’re idiots.

Images: Cristiano Betta, Let Ideas Compete and Woodleywonderworks.

Let’s take an imaginary journey to the British Empire’s last territorial acquisition.

Hang onto your hat: it could get rough.

Off we go, our ship chugging past the inviting harbours of the Outer Hebrides, the sea starting to roil as we leave the land far behind. A few hours and 40 miles out, we’re passing the archipelago of St Kilda, a broken scatter of islands, some so vertiginous they look like they’re up on end. But we’re not here to linger, so we head past them and out into empty sea. There’s nothing out here but heaving ocean. Truly nothing. Best to turn round while the weather holds, surely?

But we keep going, into choppier waters. And 187 miles west of St Kilda, through the driving sea-spray as the deck rollercoasters from one wave to the next, we see…something. A sail, perhaps – a steady fleck of white against the gunmetal sea. It’s tiny – hardly there at all. Yet in a landscape of movement, it’s the only stationary thing. 

Land.

I’m 8 years old.

I’m curled up on the airline seats we’d salvaged from a scrapped passenger plane, on the patio at the back of my parents’ U.N. (British forces) married quarters in Nicosia, Cyprus. On the seat next to me is our black plastic tape recorder with the see-through lid that flies off when you press Eject. It’s whirring – crackling out episode 4 of season 6 of The Goons, entitled “Napoleon’s Piano”.

Picture this (it’ll be a struggle, but please try): the Goons, for reasons too ludicrous to explain, are sailing the ‘fabled’ piano of Napoleon Bonaparte back to England. After various days at sea – signified by one of the cast pretending to puke, which I loved – a helicopter appears and drops Sea Ranger Bluebottle into the water. He clambers onboard.

Seagoon:

[Straining] Heeuuueeeuuueeeuuup! For those without television, I’ve pulled him back on the piano.

Bluebottle:

Piano? This is not a piano. This is Rockall.

Seagoon:

This is Napoleon’s piano.

Bluebottle:

No.. no, it is not.

Seagoon:

It is.

Bluebottle:

No, it isn’t.

Seagoon:

It’s Napoleon’s piano.

Bluebottle:

No, this is Rockall. We have tooked it because it is in the area of the rocket testing range.

Seagoon:

Rocket testing range? I’ve never heard so much rubbish in all my…

SFX:

[Wheeeee... BOOOM!]

- The Goon Show.net

“Rockall?”

This being the pre-Google 1970s, I ask my Dad. He mumbles something vague about the shipping forecast.

Northwest of Ireland, the Rockall Trough marks where the continental shelf ends, the sea floor dropping away to an abyssal depth – and at the other side of it rises a plateau of rock almost as long as Scotland. In just one place does it break the surface – a small nib of granite, the remains of a volcanic plug, poking just 20 metres (70 feet) above waves that occasionally burst right over it.

…the smallest point of a pencil could scarcely give it a place on any map that should not exaggerate its proportions.

- Captain Basil Hall

There are a few accompanying sea-level reefs that just break the waterline, including Hasselwood Rock, 200 metres north of Rockall. But that’s all.

This is worth stressing. Stand on Rockall, and you’re standing on the only piece of land for hundreds of miles in every direction, in some of the tallest seas in the world. (In 2000, oceanographers recorded individual waves up to 29 metres tall over the Rockall Trough).

And here’s how you’d look.

So you’d be mad to try? Tell that to survival expert Tom McLean, who clambered onto the islet on the 26th May 1985 (after more than one attempt) and stayed until the 4th of July, living in a homemade plywood box. Tell that to Nick Hancock, who intends to beat that record in 2011 with a whopping 60-day stay. Tell that to Greenpeace, who landed on it in 1997 and renamed it “Waveland”, a micronation protesting against plans to drill for oil in the area. (The British government drolly replied that since it was British territory, Greenpeace’s British citizens were perfectly within their rights to go there – and then proceeded to ignore them entirely). Tell that to Ben Fogle, who…well, better luck next time, mate.

So why on earth did Britain take great pains to lay claim to Rockall in the first place? Because it wasn’t just a case of drawing a line on a map – it required a landing. The first recorded footfall was Captain Basil Hall’s foray from HMS Endymion on Sunday, 8th September 1811…so why wait until 1955 to annexe the islet (formalized in 1972 with the Island of Rockall Act)? The truth seems to be a mixture of paranoia and farce. It’s not about securing oil or fishing rights – it’s about foiling those pesky Russkies.

Secret weapons testing is a tricky business. You need lots of room (as befits the “weapons testing” bit) and you need to be away from prying eyes (“secret”). And here in one of the most crowded corners of Europe, you’d be hard-pressed to find either. The logical solution is to take to the sea, and what better direction than into the sparsely inhabited fringes of the Outer Hebrides? These therefore became the theatre for the testing of the UK’s first surface-to-surface nuclear missile, the Corporal II, with launches tracked by a radar installation on St Kilda.

And here’s where it turns into an episode of Dad’s Army. It’s quite possible that someone in the government glanced at a report on Rockall, saw the word “land” and immediately envisioned a hammer and sickle fluttering above an island fortress festooned with radar dishes. Rockall was, in the words of Fraser MacDonald, “sufficiently near to the range to be an embarrassment if it were acquired by some foreign power”. Never mind the fact that nothing can cling to Rockall for long, barring truly astounding quantities of bird shit. Never mind that Soviet spy ships could have done the job for a fraction of the cost and scarper out of range when detected. No – being “land”, Rockall was a threat to national security. It was obvious. We had to have it.

Half a century on, Rockall continues to exert its curious pull on the British imagination. It’s not now true that more men have landed on the Moon than on Rockall, but the numbers aren’t far off. It remains a challenge for the adventurous, a curiosity for historians, and for me, a word associated with my earliest stirrings to see the world’s remotest corners…

But you’d never, ever get me up there.

(Best of luck, Nick).

Further reading:

• “The last outpost of Empire: Rockall and the Cold War” – Fraser MacDonald: Journal of Historical Geograpy 32 (2006) (pdf)
• “I will be king of Rockall” – Ben Fogle, Daily Telegraph, 27th April 2005.
• Rockall 2011: In Aid of Help For Heroes – Nick Hancock.

Images:  Andy Strangeway / Geograph (Wikimedia Commons), James Fisher (Wikimedia Commons), Andy Strangeways / Geograph (Wikimedia Commons), Hryck, Mike Sowden.

Hello, body.

You amaze me.

Let’s not bandy words. I’ve treated you badly.

There were the years my diet was dreadful and I never exercised. All that weight I piled on after school. You were young, you had all that energy, but even so, nothing could have taken that abuse for long. You suffered.

My dad piled the weight on round his middle, and kept it right to the end of his life. And when we worked together, we shared diets. I followed his lead.

No, that’s not fair. I was much worse.

Jars of Nutella with a spoon, in 10 minutes. Packet after packet of biscuits. Litres of full-fat Coke. Greasy pastries. Ton after ton of fat-drenched carbs. No clue about nutrition. No clue about exercise. I don’t want to think about your cholesterol level. I don’t want to think about your blood pressure. Or my first day of my walking holiday in Austria in 1993, that first agony-filled day when I hit my physical limits and they were absolutely nowhere near where I thought they were. (And I’m sorry I drowned those sorrows in chocolate. Hey. It all took time, OK?)

So I’m sorry for those years. I’m sorry your back still plays up. I’m amazed your stomach isn’t a mass of stretch marks. (Seriously, how did you recover from that?) But I’m sorry you have those stretch-marks under your arms where I cluelessly tried to weight-train the flab away. I was stupid. You bore the brunt.

But I’ve tried to make amends. I’m working hard – and listening hard, too.

You’ve been good to me beyond my wildest dreams. You’ve slimmed down when I’ve wanted you to, you’ve muscled up when I’ve needed it. You’re tough. I don’t deserve how tough you are. I’m walking 40 miles a week and you’re taking it in your stride (I made a little joke there – hope you appreciate it).

I deserve less.

But since I’m lucky enough to have you as you are right now, I intend to put you to good use.

Because, listen up: you’re a big part of my plans. With a certain level of physical toughness, I can travel like I plan to. I can cycle the whole of Sustrans Route 1, like I dearly long to. I can walk the Pennine Way and the Appalachian Trail. I can walk and walk and walk. (And I can do lots of other things too, which are frankly between you and me).

In some ways, you’re a funny old thing. Your big nose, and the way it bends off to one side. The gap between your front teeth. The way your eyes can go different directions at the same time.  The way your skin reddens and puckers at the least scratch from a cat. The way you’ve developed two small, darkly mottled patches over each cheekbone, like you’re permanently sporting black eyes. (The doc says it’s just this). You’re an odd bod. But I’ve grown to love having you around.

(Oh, and I forgive you for the hair-falling-out thing. I’m over that now. We’re good).

Despite all the crud I threw into you in my early twenties (if you’re a temple, I defiled you) – you’ve given me a second chance at having the life I want.

And no, I won’t blow it this time.

Thank you.

…..

Inspired by Christine Garvin’s Ode To My Body.

Image: W J (Bill) Harrison.

Remember this?

It concerned this.

(Feel free to wander over there and tell me I’m mad/wrong/other).

Image: arcticpuppy.

If you’re doing anything, and you want to stick at it, you’ve got to make it fun.

For me, fun is variety, surprise, chaos, ludicrous challenges, stupidity for the sheer joy of being stupid, mistake-making, game-playing, all the senses in a whirl, the thrill of ignorance becoming the lust for knowing, physically tired but bright-eyed and zingy in the brainpan, drawing big looping arrows and ringing words wildly with a ballpoint pen (this is important), activity, achievable goals capping impossible ones, really strong coffee, variety, surprise, chaos, variety, surprise, chaos.

On Friday, I wrote a useful routine for myself for getting things done – less a list than a program, a series of super-efficient, time-conserving commands that would squeeze every drop of productivity from my Saturday. It was great. I’d get so much done!

On Saturday, I went and did fun things instead.

Yesterday, I wrote a few things down on a piece of paper and tried to work out how I’d have the most fun doing them.

They’re now done.

…..

Tell me something really, really daft you once did at work that made the whole day bearable.