Step by step

I started running with a friend  a couple of years ago. At first we couldn't stagger for more than about 10 minutes but slowly, step by step, and week by week, we got fitter. I now go running down by the sea twice a week. Like writing, it is something that I sometimes love, sometimes hate, but that I always feel better when I've done it. Like getting out your pen and paper and writing your first word, the hardest part of going for a run is putting on your trainers and getting out the door. The rest of it is almost easy. Like writing, you just go with it.

Running gives me time and space to think. Ideas come to me, things work themselves out. It is great to go for a run when you have been hunched over the keyboard and you need something physical to get you out of your head. My favourite time to go is first thing in the morning before the world has awoken. I went out yesterday morning under a blue cloudless sky.It was already getting hot. As I ran through the streets I could smell wafts of roses and jasmine in people's front gardens and hear the sounds of children getting up for breakfast. The sea was as still as a lake. 

Do you run? If you don't, you should try it. Believe me, I was never the running kind but now I love it. Or what else do you recommend to get you out of your mind and into your body?

Space and solitude

Yesterday a couple of friends and I trekked through the fields to see Anish Kapoor's C-Curve. It was beautiful: a strange object that looked like it had been left by aliens. It reflected back hyper-real images of ourselves, the fields and the cows, like a mirror into another world. Adults and children posed and giggled in front of their reflections like in a funfair hall of mirrors. Cameras clicked and flashed. Voices rang out louder in the quiet of the fields. I found myself wishing there were just a few of us there, or that I was alone, to really take in the experience, to drink in the peace and the clouds above me with no one but the cows for company.

Perhaps this is because I have been craving space and solitude recently. I have been longing for a Virginia Woolf's room of one's own. This is a luxury I, like many of you I'm sure, just can't afford right now. A private study is some years away for me. Instead I write at the kitchen table, or on my bed. Where ever I can get peace. This is hard sometimes. I am not the Jane Austen type; my ideas dry up when people and noise flows around me. I need quiet to reach down and hear those words inside me. 

I have the flat to myself this weekend and I am revelling in the peace broken only by my tapping fingers and a ticking clock, and the muted sounds of the neighbours lives. 

How do you carve out your own solitude and space to create?

To see some stunning photos of the C-curve, look here. 

Away

I am back from a fantastic few days in Cornwall. We stayed here.

I am imagining what life would be like if every day you awoke to a sea that spread as far as the eye could see. To a perfectly clean bathroom and a hot powerful shower. To a breakfast with fresh napkins, pats of butter on white plates, jugs of fresh juice. Where the day stretched ahead of you, free from the to-do lists and jobs, and that tense little knot of all the things you feel you have to do but don't have time for. When instead you walk barefoot in the sand and think about your next meal. And come home to nap on a bed that's been plumped and made for you while you've been out. What bliss!