Tag: mindfulness

thing 50: ‘My soul is sunk’:* St Cuthbert’s Way, part (iii)

Is a Kitkat a chocolate bar or a biscuit? This might not seem an important distinction but when you’re 7 miles in and the “chocolate bar” promised in the hotel packed lunch turns out to be a Kitkat, you can feel cruelly misled. These things matter, is all I’m saying.

Breakfast had been rather good, you see. I had Eggs Florentine and coffee, served in a grand salon with huge mirror panels with fancy glass lights on them and the kind of embossed, gold, fol-de-rol wallpaper which only makes sense in big public spaces like this. Jenny and I were tucked (more…)

thing 40: ‘what will survive of us is love’: St Hilda’s way, part (iv)

This would be a fine place to spend eternity.

From the lichened drystone wall where I sat the land rolled away to the horizon, a series of gradual grassy undulations punctuated with clumps of shrubs and trees. In the distance the peat browns and heather purples of the moor spread their muted patchwork; within the tiny churchyard itself, oaks, ashes and other trees were stretching (more…)

thing 38: ‘all experience is an arch’: the spirituality of travel

I’m lucky enough to be able to say that Grasmere’s not a long way away for me. Pretty much all year round, though, getting up into the Lakes on a Friday involves crawling along in traffic (and though I can’t really blame people for wanting to drink it all in, that doesn’t mean I don’t blame them, vociferously, in the privacy of my own car). (more…)

thing 31: ‘the year is going, let him go’: tidying up

I know. Sounds most unlikely as a special or celebratory act, right? But stay with me. It’s been a pretty thorough tidying up, with some surprisingly lovely and unexpectedly profound things involved.

It all started when my landlady was getting people in to quote for redecorating my house, and one of the decorators thus consulted had a look in the front room where all my books and bookbinding equipment and supplies live—and we are talking a lot of paper here, friends—and said, ‘Hmm, when we’re done, you’ll have a chance to put things back nicely, won’t you?’. Patronising git. (And he left the seat up, too.) (more…)

thing 29: ‘one person, and they’re talking to you’: a radio interview

A few years ago I was interviewed in a sort of rent-a-therapist slot on Radio Cumbria; they wanted someone in the biz to say something vaguely intelligent for a “dealing with difficult events” programme. Getting the phone call from some BBC gofer I’d thought it was a wind-up, but there I was, about an hour later, sitting in my study being invited to pronounce on a variety of things down the telephone—and live on air. Surreal. ‘Ah yes, (more…)