What I Did On My Holidays

August 2024

Even if I didn’t own a calendar and wasn’t fully aware that tomorrow is the first day of meteorological autumn the bite in the air on my dawn walks this week, tendrils of winter reaching out through the first mists of the season to brush tips of fingers and noses, would have clued me in.

Photo by Artem Balashevsky on Unsplash

This time of year makes me want to buy fresh notebooks, new pens, possibly a new bag to keep them all in and, less helpfully, sends a nervous anticipation through me that is completely without cause. It is well over twenty years since I was headed back to school and yet the echoes of those years still reverberate through my body.

If I were still in what some people, entirely incorrectly as far as I am concerned, persist in calling “the best years of your life” I might be asked to pen a missive with the same title as this newsletter, to be delivered on my first day back at school. Back then it would have contained stories of camping in the garden, visiting my grandparents up in Northumberland, day trips to castles, gardens, museums and, in the good years, two weeks exploring a part of Northern France or making the most of the beaches on Guernsey.

This year my “summer holiday” has mostly contained lists:

1. Lists of boxes packed, of what is packed in each one, and of where they are stored.

2. Lists of things still to clear, to clean, to fix, to decorate before the estate agents can be summoned.

3. Lists of services to be engaged, services to cancel, companies to book, and people to contact about the house sale.

4. Lists of symptoms¹ to research, each generating a list of their possible mitigations.

5. Lists of things I’d hoped to do but didn’t because I didn’t have either the time, the money, or the energy.

Of course doing (or not, as in the case of list 4) the things on those lists must be fitted around everything on what I have taken to calling The Sisyphean List Of Basic Things.

You know the one I mean.

It contains all the chores that must be done daily/weekly/monthly in order to remain a functioning part of the human race. None of them stop needing to be done just because you have other really important things to do, all of them need doing again the next day/week/month, and all of them cause some degree of chaos² if you don’t remember to do them in a timely manner.

And yet there is one more list, one not written down because the things on it only happen in the gaps you can find or force between the tasks on the other lists. They are the things you forget need to happen because they seem either small, trivial, or unimportant compared with everything on the other lists. But, on closer inspection, you can see these things are the foundations on which all the other lists rest. Mainly because if you don’t make time for them you become unglued from yourself and thus utterly unable to do anything.

For the last two months my unwritten “List of Things to Prevent Ungluing” contained the following:

• Dawn walks, as often as my body could be persuaded to do them.

• Quarter of an hour each morning and afternoon with a coffee/tea/iced water where I either sat and watched the birds in the garden or read a book, uninterrupted.

• Music while I worked on complicated tasks.

• Audiobooks whilst working on something entirely manual (like cleaning).

• Writing something. Anything in fact. Other than a list. A couple of lines before bed being sufficient if no other writing time had been snatched during the day.

• Nightly meditation, immediately before sleep, to quiet my mind and put the day to bed.

It may be short but it was also sweet, the spoonful of sugar to the medicine of life so to speak. And it worked. I remain fully glued and functional.

Plus those tiny treats have resulted in:

1. Magical encounters with birds and beasties on a semi-regular basis, including:

Gloucester Old Spot Pigs and a young Roe Deer

2. Blackberry foraging that produced some utterly delectable blackberry simple syrup:

3. Words. Including but not limited to …

• The typing up the recipe for the syrup and the sharing of it over on my blog, which in turn generated lovely messages from the five (so far) people who saw it, tried it, and really enjoyed it.

• Sharing my thoughts about what Wildwood tales I might be telling next.

• An update on my yarn wrangling.

• Playing with prompts from a submission call that, despite not producing anything submittable, gave my creative muscles a much needed workout in a direction they hadn’t been taken for a long while.

Of course some of my writing time over the weeks since my last newsletter should also have been used to create this one.

It was not.

I could claim that I left writing this to the last minute for verisimilitude - who amongst us has not left our holiday homework until the last possible moment - but that would imply a level of planning on my part and thus would be a lie. I kept meaning to do it and then suddenly it was the last day of the month and where there was a blank page two hours ago this now exists.

I do hope you will forgive any lapses of grammar and/or wonky sentences that may have occurred as a result.

Next month will herald the return of the newsletter in its intended form, rather than the ramble through my life via lists that you have been dubiously gifted today.

For now, though, I leave you with some brief thoughts as to what September might ask of us, based on this card drawn from my Prisma Visions tarot deck:

Seven of Wands

The path to be taken is clearly visible, even if it doesn’t seem to be a particularly easy one. However daunting it seems, know that the journey isn’t asking anything of you that you aren’t capable of giving.

Keep your balance, hold your nerve, and let all you’ve learnt and worked for carry you along it swiftly and safely.

And lastly, I offer a small blessing to take with you:

May the days ahead hold all the blessings you could need,
and your heart hold all the love and peace you could want.

1. It seems that I am perimenopausal. I am displeased by this development but I am also not a “stick my head in the sand” kind of woman, thus I have sourced relevant books to read and now have much to learn. In time there will be a blog post sharing the resources I have found helpful but, for now, I am gritting my teeth, drinking a lot of iced water, and using a cooling towel whilst I figure out something better.

2. Given that one of the things on list 4 is a memory that is becoming ever more sieve-like with each passing day, there has been more chaos happening of late than is optimal for my sanity.