Being Outside More

A warm Saturday morning in September dawned, I felt the urge to celebrate the full moon, the Harvest moon. I knew I needed to be walking through fields, the romantic image of a lone figure in the landscape. I walk, therefore I am. The bus was noisy with a chattering flock of teenage girls who alighted at Cabot Circus, our glass-roofed city centre shopping mall, eager for retail opportunities and bubble tea. The green-liveried smoothly whining electric bus lumbered on, and after much meandering, came to the place where the houses thinned, the edge of the city. I had chosen a route from Whitchurch, once a village in North Somerset, now part of Bristol’s suburban sprawl, and Stanton Drew, home to a Neolithic stone circle. It’s about five or six miles, mostly following the ‘Three Peaks Way’ footpath. Pre-pandemic, when I was working three or four days a week in an office, I used to do this more. Pack up my rucksack and an OS map, lace up my boots and take a bus into Somerset, walk for a fe...

  My mind is busy, I don’t know what to offer you. After those long days of August limbo life has exploded into gear, dates scribbled into the diary are becoming real. I have sort of started a new job, a day a week at the setting I have been working as bank staff for several years, providing one-to-one support to a child with additional needs. In a contrary way I am new and not new at the same time. September always means new children, new names and faces, new people to understand. But this year there are also online systems to grapple with, with a flock of new passwords and PINs. If a child plays in the woods and is not photographed, did it even happen? In addition this academic year I’m providing cover in another outside setting, a dreamy place, a Kindergarten that really is a garden. A setting created with such meticulous care and attention, it is exciting to be even a small part of such a place. Mondays I try to protect for writing, and also giving some time to a campaign to bu...

  I can tell that September is well underway now. The spiders have arrived. This absolute beauty has slung its web between my bike shed and front garden wall. Known as a garden or cross spider, it's very common in the UK, Araneus diadematus if you're feeling fancy. Monday passed in a haze of discombobulation, there was admin to be done, sensible phone calls to be attended to, using my best talking to professionals voice. Combined with the increasingly dire warnings about the capability of AI to destroy us all, my brain did not feel in a comfortable and creative state. You wait ages for one existential threat to humanity, and then they all come at once. Hard to be whimsical in the circumstances. In search of distraction and novelty yesterday, I set off on my bike to explore the new Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus (TQEC), a brand new offshoot of the University of Bristol. The new campus behind Temple Meads railway station is stretching out into an area that when I first came to...

  The wheel of the year is turning, the rains have finally come. Yesterday I sat in a brightly-lit nursery playroom for a staff INSET day, autumn displays already up on the walls. All is change, all is pushing forwards, expectations are being set for the year ahead. I find myself not wanting to write about 'Back to School', too many mixed emotions, too many memories. Like the fact that it's 16 years since I took my son, blonde and tufty-headed, for his first day at primary school. He rushed into the reception classroom, so eager and curious for what was to come. And now we're preparing to send him off again, this time for his second year of a Biology degree, in Plymouth. He definitely won't be home in time for tea. Instead I offer you a poem. I went to a poetry open mic night at Bristol Folk House last week with a some friends from a women's writing group. I've set myself a challenge of standing up and reading something myself by the end of the year. The poe...