Feest Isolation Days – 9 September
I do a lot of writing. Which means I do a lot of sitting. I also do a lot of tea drinking. Now what on earth do these two things have in common you may well ask. Several things actually, but the one that I am about to tell you of is a direct result of Covid. I used to write and sit a lot before Covid, but I was also going outside a lot more, doing more walking around than I do now, swimming three times a week. Exercise has changed. Now, every time I make a cup of tea, I do some exercise in my kitchen. I either grab two tins from the shelf and do my arm exercises while the kettle boils, or I practice nearly sitting in a chair fifty times. Go on try it. Don’t sit all the way down, just nearly on the seat. Don’t use your arms to get up. Start with ten or so and work up to the full fifty. Or a hundred. The arm exercises with tins are from my Pilates routine. There are plenty of people on- line who will help you find these. The important thing is that you make them a part of your routine. This is not, by the way, instead of my Pilates or bike ride or walks or indoor cycles, but in addition to them. Why I didn’t think of this before Covid, I have no idea. But there has to be some good that comes from this wretched virus!
Where do you get your ideas from, my friends ask. How do you come up with all these paragraphs day after day? I honestly don’t know the answer to that! What I do know is that once you get into the flow, something happens and ideas emerge. The ideas are there flitting in and out and some of them land and others never do. I thought I’d see where other people got their inspiration from and had to share this one! I have always been a fan of Simon and Garfunkel. Both as a duo and as single entertainers later when they split. Here’s Paul Simon singing one of my favourites.
You will no doubt have heard it hundreds of times! He shared the genesis for these lyrics. He was in a Chinese Restaurant looking at the menu deciding what he was going to eat, and one of the dishes was called the Mother and Child Reunion. He filed it away and said to himself that one day “I gotta use that one!” Paul certainly took us as far away from a restaurant, Chinese or otherwise, with his eventual lyrics. Little known fact, (to me anyway) about Paul Simon? He was married to Carrie Fisher for a year between 1983 and 84.
You never know what you may find out in your day when you just set out and let it happen. Some of the more interesting bits of life head your way if you keep your eyes open. Better than watching and listening to all the political shenanigans every day! No one knows where that word shenanigans comes from by the way. Yet we all know what it means…tricksters a foot. And that is all I’m saying about the political landscape in the UK today. Except – I can’t help myself…TONY ABBOT GO BACK TO OZ!
There, got that off my chest.
Have a great and trickster free day!
With love
Kathy x