Time flies when you’re having fun

… which is why we’re now nearly a third of the way through this year and there hasn’t been a single blog entry yet. Life’s great though, and I just wanted to note that here for posterity.

But, having just had a look through my 2015 plans from the year end survey, I’ve actually not achieved very much:

Eliminator Race in February (Achilles trouble)
✓ Placebo twice in Feb / March.
Paris Marathon in April. (Achilles trouble)
– Work on swimming (on and off, long break due to 1. shoulder trouble 2. hating it)
– buy road bike (about to!)
– do first triathlon (well, we’ll see…)
Finish novel first draft, hopefully soonish. Then second draft? I hope so! (I have no excuse for this except I… had other stuff to do?)

What I did do tho was:
✓ adopt the best cat in the world (and build him a ladder and shelves and and and…)
✓ do a mindfulness course
✓ work a lot in March
✓ not work very much since
✓ think about moving to a ground floor / bigger flat (due to cat & bike)

And of course it’s not so long until New York (and Paris before that!)

Next update in August! *lmao* (no, there will be travelogues before that of course)

End of Year survey 2014

Yay, time for end of year survey! More »

Why writing is like running

Speak for yourself, you may say at this point. Okay, I am! This is how writing has been like running for me, or more specifically, how NaNoWriMo has been like Couch25K.  More »

Paris quickie

Just realised I never wrote a travelog for my most recent Paris trip. This is unacceptable. The records must be complete!!!! More »

Once an addict… ?

So here’s an interesting article: Most People With Addiction Simply Grow Out of It: Why Is This Widely Denied? The author, Maia Szalavitz, is “one of the [America’s] leading neuroscience and addiction journalists” (and also a respected Mefite). More »

Blighters in Brighton

Okay. Here’s a piece – a few pieces actually – I wrote for Geo-Writing, which was part of the Brighton Digital Festival. It’s a great idea – you get a prompt based on your location (most are in Brighton, but there are world-wide ones too), then write up to 300 words around it. I ended up grabbing a bunch of prompts, going west to east from West Street to the hospital, and writing a continuous story with them. Some prompts worked better than others, but I managed to get them all in. More »

Flipping the switch, or: On Beauty

So I had an interesting experience today, an epiphany of sorts. I was on a run along Castle Hill, one of my favourite part of the Downs, and I was listening to the latest episode of This American Life, specifically Act 3 about a young woman’s rather unusual life plans. If you want to listen to the episode, I recommend you don’t read on just yet but get yourself somewhere pretty and natury. Or somewhere urban if you prefer. But don’t listen to it at home, sitting at your computer. Nor in a coffee shop. Go outside. Then come back and tell me about it! More »

Rooooome in the sun!

The Clarissa Travelogue continues… tho this will be a short one. You’ll find photos here, and special Cimitero del Verano set here. But do read on! More »

Pariiiis in the sun

So I don’t really have to log these here anymore as I log them in my journal app, but somehow the blag would be incomplete without them. Even as I try to declutter my real life, my hoarding instinct survives online. =)) More »

I have thoughts. Let me show you them!

A lot of pretty disparate thoughts and I’m not sure if they’ll make a good blag post, but since I’ve not written in here in a while I’ll give it a try.

Like yesterday for instance. I can’t even remember what specifically set me off but I was walking down the street and saw something “British blabla” and thought “ugh”. (It was some ad in the form of “buy this cuz it was made in Britain / made for British people”.) And for some reason I then remembered how as a kid or teenager I used to love Britain so much and dream of living here, at that time thinking of course that it would never happen. And this made me sad – that I no longer have that enthusiasm and wonder for the country I chose. I should perhaps attempt to see more of the positive, and less of the negative, and if anything, try to help change the country into what I’d want it to be. Because having looked around in my re-emigration search, I’ve come to the conclusion that there really isn’t much better around anyway. Scandinavia, that’s it. But they’re even colder than here. Most days anyway.

Bloody people tho. People in general. Humans. I don’t feel much love for them these days. I’ve given quite a bit of thought to the mess we’re making of the planet – pollution, climate change, overfishing, destroying the Amazon, big agri business, non-sustainability… I mean all it basically is people not thinking beyond the immediate future. “Why should I, now, have to make sacrifices for some hypothetical long term benefit I may not even get to experience.” And also: “Why should I, rather than someone else, make sacrifices…” Some people say it quite openly, but most cloak it in denial and just stick their heads in the sand. Once you start thinking about these issues – about what we have done to the planet – you see more and more examples everywhere and you just get disgusted. It’s also so hopeless. We’re basically a force of evil and destruction. The greed! It’s just horrible.

This entry is now over a month old again and I never finished / posted it, so I’ll just put it online as is cuz it’s kinda embarrassing that I never update this anymore. Maybe I should just stop doing that altogether. But, but… my blag 🙁