Walking in half term

... and seemingly through the seasons, too. I'm not entirely sure what moved me to walk every day this week, but once I started, I didn't want to stop. I've walked both old and new paths, and it's been a lovely way to relax, and to catch up with friends and family this half term.

Sunday's walk took myself and my oldest friend to the hilly climbs of Hampstead Heath. Sun shining in the morning, we were feeling optimistic. We met at the Tube station and wandered along through the houses, Olive's historical commentary detailing points of interest. From the residential streets we headed onto the heath itself, took a wrong turn or two, but somehow found our way to Kenwood House where we stopped for a well-deserved cup of tea, and a slice of cake in the setting sun. Shoes caked in mud, and a rosy colour to our cheeks (perhaps heightened by the sudden onset of hail out of nowhere while we trekked across an unknown section of heath without shelter), as we sat down on the train to take us home we decided it was an adventure worth having.

Monday's walk saw my return to Walthamstow Wetlands. Having taken the long way round on New Year's Day, I was pleased to show Georgie the actual way in. Coffee in hand, we took the scenic (but still short) route through Markfield Park, and along the canal to the Wetlands' entrance. Despite sunshine in the morning, by the time we were walking we were met with dramatic skies and gusts of wind strong enough to feel a little unsafe along the water's edge. The sun did make the occasional appearance, warming our backs as we walked and talked, but by the time we had walked around two of the reservoirs, we decided it was time to thaw out in the Ferry Boat.

Tuesday's walk took Steven, Pepper and myself much further afield. Swayed by Time Out's recommendations of beaches 'near' London, we set off in search of Dungeness... words can't quite describe the experience. The weather was not as pleasant as the last two days had been. The cold was deep set, and the wind was beyond strong. Grey skies, and the need for fast-paced window wipers did not fill us with a great deal of hope. Nevertheless, in true British stubborn style, we journeyed on to the coast. Even having read descriptions of Dungeness, I don't think we were quite prepared for just how surreal it actually was. It felt like Snettisham Beach (a familiar stretch of coast home in Norfolk) on steroids. Vast, over-looked by a huge power station, and dotted with fishermen's huts, difficult to tell whether inhabited or not. We drove for a while along the road leading past all of this, stopping eventually at a small parking area with a board detailing what wildlife could be found there. The wind at this point was so strong that it was whistling through the car, and literally shaking us all around. The look between us said it all, but Pepper needed to stretch her legs after the long drive, so Steven braved it. Opening the door, the wind whipped all around the car, tearing receipts and sugar sachets out into the open. No use chasing after them. I stayed firmly put while the madder of us tried their best to run along against the wind. The sight was sure an amusing one, and as they returned to the car, unable to face it any more, the tears streamed; mine from laughter, and Steven's from the sheer force of the wind. We decided to at least stay a while to eat a sandwich and have a drink. And once we'd actually taken our surroundings in a bit more, decided to go for one more attempt at a walk before moving on to somewhere that we hoped would be more sheltered. We managed a walk to the sea and back, which was long enough against the wind, the rain also battering us at this point. Safely back in the car, we ventured on to the more familiar territory of Camber Sands.
Still grey. Still windy. Still absolutely freezing. We parked up in the carpark by the beach, where there were two other vehicles this time, so we at least felt that we weren't completely alone, and headed out once more into the elements. The rain had subsided for a while, so we walked a bit further this time; out to the sea, and along to the sand dunes, before turning back to chase the sun. Watching Pepper skit back and forth across the sand, occasionally risking a paddle in pools around the groynes was definitely worth bracing the cold for. As much as I'd prefer a sunny day on the beach, there's something to be said for sea air at any time of the year.

Wednesday's walk was simply to the gym and back. And later along Oxford Street trying to beat the crowds to the good stuff in the M&S Valentine's selection. It was another cold day, so my walks were brisk, and with purpose.

Thursday's walk embraced the slight shift in weather. An actual day of sun took me on a new walk, around Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park, with a promise of snowdrops. Suddenly it really was much more mild, and as Hanzel and I walked in the late afternoon, the sun cut low through the trees.

Friday's walk was a detour. The sun truly shining, and even the air feeling much warmer, I treated myself to a deviation around a new reservoir in the Walthamstow Wetlands. Through Markfield Park and along the canal again, this time I entered on the other side of the road, passing around the Engine House and on to unexplored lands. As a Chinook flew overhead upon my arrival, I knew I was onto a good thing. Basking in the sun, I ambled along past bird-watchers and families out to enjoy nature in an otherwise industrial, suburban area. Reaching the end of the reservoir, I came upon another tower, this one with the possibility of climbing, which always excites me. Looking out I could see as far as Canary Wharf in one direction, Alexandra Palace in another. Actually pausing my music for a moment, I appreciated instead the persistent call of birds; swans, Canada Geese, moorhens, coots, ducks, seagulls, and no doubt others that I can't name.

Saturday's walk was with cousins. One of my favourite things about having friends and family to visit is being able to introduce them to some of my own favourite places. At the same time, there's an element of pressure as you worry that your tastes are a little acquired, but needless to say, it's usually a success. We began with brunch, before an immediate return to the Wetlands (for a new discovery, it's definitely been a firm favourite spot already this year) where we took almost the exact same route as I had done alone the day before. Our next port of call was God's Own Junkyard, which was busier than ever before thanks to some event or another that was going on in the breweries nearby. Fortunately, we still found a seat in the Rolling Scones café and enjoyed refreshment in amongst the neon. We then found ourselves wandering along Brick Lane, browsing, buying, and admiring street art, all the way to Dishoom, where our journey ended with a feast and full stomachs.

Today's walk was another practical one. To the gym (where I hiked around Kauai, Hawaii), and home via the supermarket, where I picked up bits for my packed lunch and the return to work. Generally another grey day, it didn't feel too much of a waste to spend more of it inside. If the weather is picking up, though, I'll be doing a lot more walking not just on my days off, but on my working days too. Thank goodness for sunshine and a milder climate.

Our garden

Although this is the shortest summer I have had in 5 years, it certainly feels like a summer well-deserved after a long, long year!

Having had to abandon all hobbies in favour of endless planning and resource-creating, I have already begun to make attempts to reclaim my pre-PGCE self. Yesterday, I finished the third book I have read since I finished the course, and the fourth book I have finished in 4 years whilst escapism into fiction has been replaced with endless academia. The book was Summer Book by Tove Jansson (author of the Moomin series – although this is one of her ten adult novels) and it was very idyllic and nostalgic with beautiful, simple imagery throughout. While summers for Sophia and her grandmother seem to be marked by events of interest, mine take a rather more habitual turn (particularly the parts of summer spent at home). Each year I seem to find myself doing the exact same things that I have done every year before. Already, having spent less than a week at home, this summer is no exception! 

Days will usually go in one of two directions (or, more often than not, consist of a combination of the two)

1.      A day spent in the garden 

2.       A day spent reminding myself how to play my instruments

As I write this, I am sat on the decking in the garden enjoying the sunshine, surrounded by an extraordinary amount of butterflies and buzzing things (I admit, the buzzing things are slightly off-putting, and slightly too close to my head, but it’s a comfort to know that they’re certainly not dying off in our garden)! Today the temperature is only in the low 20s, and there is a slight breeze rustling through the trees and tickling my neighbour’s wind chimes. To my right is brilliant blue sky, to my left the clouds are looming, but I’m convinced that the temperature won’t drop too far and the rain won't come and force me to move! Not quite the conditions to participate in my favourite garden pastime, a day like today is instead an opportunity to entertain my inner-middle-aged-lady and do a spot of gardening! Of course the hard graft is Dad’s responsibility, so I’m left in the fortunate position of being able to use the garden for a bit of horticultural therapy – if horticultural therapy isn’t a thing which someone is capitalising on, it most definitely should be!

When we first arrived at number 111 our garden was more like a jungle; overgrown, and overrun with brambles and stinging nettles. There was a ‘pond’, which was literally a washing up bowl sunk into the ground, and a stray kitten which had already claimed the jungle as its own. Over the years the garden has grown into what it is now, but throughout, one thing has been constant, and is the reason why I love it so much; the garden at number 111 is really just an extension of the house. Although perhaps whilst in its jungle-like state it was less accommodating, as we stripped away the interior of the house, so too was the exterior stripped back to discover what lay beneath. 

The top of the garden nearest the house; the washing up bowl/pond
was in amongst this somewhere

The bottom of the garden; this is where we now park our cars!
(I don't even know what the metal thing near the fencing post is?)

The first part of the garden to be uncovered was the small patch of grass which still remains today. In the early days we would sit out on the grass for lunch with the kitten (to whom the jungle really belonged).

Not the most attractive photo of any of us. Oh the 90's!

Nowadays there are also three patio areas and the decking to choose from and we’ve even upgraded from a picnic blanket to patio furniture where breakfast, lunch, and tea are consumed whenever possible! Al fresco dining is quite the luxurious experience in the Brockway household, although I do feel for my poor, unsuspecting neighbours who have had to bear witness to countless risqué conversation topics over the years whilst I have entertained my girl friends! Our patios have provided the perfect place for an over-spill of guests at parties thrown by my brother and I, whilst in my younger days and the beginnings of my ‘musical career’, the decking became a stage for concerts performed to my long-suffering parents (photos of which I am massively upset not to be able to locate)! Oh wait..

Year 6; this is what Laura the clarinettist looks like!

Throughout our childhood, the garden was brought alive by mine and my brother’s imagination. Our sheds lie between a cherry tree and a medlar, and when we were smaller, lighter and more limber (I say this, I may have to test the theory!), we had our own little treetop world to play in. We could easily spend hours up there, on look-out (or rather, spying on the neighbours), and pretending to be explorers. The beauty of our garden is that it is split into two. At one end lie the patios and the decking. At the other, secreted away by a Dogwood and various other tall and wide shrubs, is the lawn and our trees. We used to camp out for the day, making fires and sneaking to the house for provisions!

In the very early stages of stripping the interior of the house, lots of floorboards were kept outside providing excellent den-building materials! Suddenly the trees were exclusively our own as we built entrances at the bottom which only we were small enough to squeeze through. As exciting as these floorboards were, my favourite piece of abandoned furniture must have been the bath, which of course became a boat amongst other things and took us on many exciting adventures around the world! Unfortunately we couldn’t convince mum and dad to let us keep it.

Upon visiting friends, it often felt as though most gardens belonged to their parents, where they were expected to keep off the grass and away from the flower beds! Our garden has never been like that; it is a place for anyone who may come to be there. As a friend even said to me today, ‘your garden feels like you could be anywhere in the world when you’re sat in it’. I don’t think it will ever lose its magical qualities, even in adulthood. 

Food & wine on the decking this summer, bliss.

Grabbing horns, bobbing along, childhood nostalgia, and a little history

I can’t believe how long it’s been since I last wrote! I’ve been a crazy kind of busy, and by the time I ever have a moment to sit down and write, I feel like whatever has happened is suddenly rather irrelevant (it’s not just a case of nothing interesting happening, honestly)! I can’t deny I am a lover of being busy and I certainly feel as though I have an awful lot of purpose at the moment, which is never a bad thing! So I write to you with some of the ‘best bits’ of the last month I suppose; just to prove that I haven’t just disappeared into a deep, dark cave somewhere (although there’s still time).

Something that this year has taught me is that I need to grab opportunities and take risks. In a nutshell, there’s been a lot of bull-grabbing – or at least the horns of bulls. One pretty big ‘event’ over the past month has been my weekly swimming lessons! I’m still pretty ashamed to admit that I’m an adult taking swimming lessons, and apparently it’s quite unbelievable that someone who loves water as much as I do can’t actually swim in it? The decision was spurred on by my visit with a year 4 class to the public swimming pool where I had my own school swimming lessons. Memories of watching all of my classmates move up into the ‘big pool’ until I was the only one left in the ‘baby pool’ surrounded by many floats and with no clue how to actually move came flooding back, and the fear of slipping, falling in and just sinking slowly to the bottom made me think it was perhaps time to face my fear. I’m almost at the end of my 6 weeks of lessons now, and my confidence has certainly improved no end; so much so that I will definitely be booking in more lessons, and not just because I still can’t actually swim on my front but because I really enjoy bobbing about, and the exercise can’t be doing me any harm?

View of the Church from Cromer Pier

Talking of swimming, took a very lovely trip to Cromer a few weekends ago (not that I even paddled actually, it was FREEZING and very, very windy so I was a little too wrapped up). The last time I was there I’d been singing in the Church with the Festival Chorus and getting very chilly! It seems I’ve been experiencing a lot of nostalgia this month, because this time I was reminded of trips there with my family as a child when we would stay in West Runton and go off to Cromer for the day just for a change of scenery. I think it may have brought out my inner child slightly as I got all excited along the pier, and was a little over-enthusiastic about the Henry Blogg Museum where I made my very own medal with a fancy press. I have a bit of an affinity with the RNLI as my very own Grandad was on the lifeboats, and apparently in a picture or two at the Museum – which I thought I’d made up so sadly didn’t spot him this time – I’ll just have to go back.

My 'medal' from the Henry Blogg Museum

I’m not usually one for an interest in history, but personal history is always a little more appealing. My violin and bow have now been in my possession for (I think) about 10 years (how awful is it that I can’t actually remember how old I was when I got them even though I remember the whole experience so very vividly??) but I’d never actually looked into the history of my violin until very recently. There is an old concert programme that has sat in the case since the day I took it home, and I’d had a quick flick through it and kept it because it was quite cool having a programme from a concert that the previous owner had performed in.

Concert programme from June 1960, newspaper cutting of a
 photograph from the performance, and my beautiful violin

Little did I know that the owner was actually a pretty big deal in the violin and orchestral world, as concertmaster of the Hague Philharmonic for many years of his musical career! Theo Olof actually only died last year, and has left a huge legacy behind him – I can’t help but wonder if I’m even meant to have his violin or whether perhaps it was stolen many years ago and is still in the process of being recovered? For anyone who has got a bit lost/bored by this last tit-bit, MY VIOLIN IS ON GOOGLE IMAGES, it’s cool. He's also on Spotify performing a bit of Britten (quite apt for this post I'd say):

Theo Olof – Violin Concerto Op. 15 (original version): II. Vivace - Cadenza -

I’m deluding myself if I think that all of this would ever fit on a postcard. Hoping to have a little more time for ramblings so I won’t have to let a load out at once again in the near future! 

New Year's Resolutions

Not even made it to the New Year and already thinking ahead to what my resolutions may be. For me resolutions seem to be made not only on the 1^st of January but at every turning point; new term, next birthday, even just a new week. Had a lovely week post-Christmas full of family visits, a spa trip, and a brief walk on the beach cut a little too short as we were caught out by a torrential downpour. All of these things got me thinking about what I already have and love, and what might benefit from a little change. Hopefully this year should be a pretty exciting one, with a bit of luck ending with the completion of my first term of teaching. I suppose the only thing is how I get to that point, so I thought resolutions this year could help to lead me there.

First the family visit experience. I have an unusually tiny family admittedly, with only two cousins, two sets of aunts and uncles and sadly only one grandparent, but we never cease to have fun. Visits are often limited to once or twice a year, yet despite the distance and the time apart it always surprises me just how alike we all are. Christmas in particular is done better by no other family in terms of the sheer volume of decorations, eating, and silly games. Highlight this year had to be my 86-year-old Nan (‘same age as the Queen don’t you know?’) acting out the word ‘dead’ in a charades-type game – complete silence, and a bout of hysteria swept the room as no one knew quite how to react to the situation (she really was very convincing).

Spa was a first-time experience of the whole shebang so quite a revelation, but very lovely. Sitting on a lounger in a darkened room with pictures of the beach and sounds of the sea didn’t feel quite as satisfying when I wasn’t getting a tan, and spending the day in a robe surrounded by fellow robe-wearers could take some getting used to. Then managing a cup of tea and a mince pie whilst covered in mud was not something which was particularly successful and the consequence of mud washed off by ‘tropical rain’ may have been more than a little disturbing to other guests. Regardless, would definitely repeat the experience!

Finally the walk today was not quite as idyllic as the last one, although again quite an experience. As everyone else abandoned the beach when the first few drops of rain fell, we soldiered on thinking them complete wimps – only seconds later to be soaked through to the bone resulting in a hasty, side-stepping escape, battling against the winds in pursuit of a beach hut for shelter!

Life is fun, and I wouldn’t change a lot of things for the world. But aims for the year are as follows (and now I have plenty of witnesses to give me the much needed nudges):

1.       Stop being so lazy! The contrast between a year spent on my feet all day, every day, to a term of 9-5 sitting down is already taking its toll – I WILL start moving more again.

2.       Budget! If I actually want to be able to afford to do anything or go anywhere by the end of this year, I really need to keep an eye on my spending again... Yes the ring and vintage habit may have to take a cut-back. I weep.

3.       Pass this year! Think that one’s pretty self-explanatory. Just got to make sure I don’t burn out, hence the need for my down-time, friends, family, and having fun. Maybe I’ll even get a job too??

I’m excited.