Body language

This post is brought to you by the faintly-remembered feeling of pre-exam nerves. Visions of desk-lined gym halls and bored-looking teachers pacing the aisles keep flashing through my head, accompanied by an associated wave of nausea each time. It’s my Thai yoga massage assessment this weekend, which begins with a gruelling fifty question anatomy exam tomorrow morning. As such, I’ve spent the day trying to remember how to revise. The only part of my revision technique that I could remember was that it was always most definitely last-minute. My sisters and I all share the May trait of last-minute cramming and it has seemed to have worked out for us over the years, so I was fairly confident that it would work as it always had done. Hmmmm… not so sure now. Still, another default May trait is to always absolutely believe 100% that you are going to fail the exam, right up until the point you get a spoddy A.

Rather than completely regress to my youth, when I would have been cramming, high on coffee and chocolate, into the wee hours, I am endeavouring to benefit from my age-old wisdom (ahem) and have a chilled evening and an early night, having faith that I’ll come up with the goods tomorrow. This seems a particularly sensible strategy seeing as I was up at 1:30am this morning off to count bats on another dawn survey.

As such, I will keep this post brief, and just share with you some of the wonderful physiological and anatomical names that I have come across during my last-minute revision session today (doubling up as one final revision test for moi, hurrah). Our language is an endless joy of ponciness…

• Islets of Langerhan (summat to do with hormones in the pancreas but sounds like it’s a faraway land straight out of Middle Earth)
• pons Varolii (part of the brain that transmits messages between the brain and spinal cord)
• mound of venus (a most whimsical name for the pubic ‘mound’ on a female, tee hee)
• Node of Ranvier (found on a nerve cell)
• Golgi apparatus (tiny structure in a cell)
• Cerebellum (part of the brain that controls physical balance – I kind of feel this would be a pretty name if I ever had a daughter, although she’d possibly never forgive me…)
• Medulla oblongata (another part of the brain – it’s a hotbed of beautiful, mysterious names, which is quite fitting I suppose – this part controls involuntary actions like the heart beat)
• Acromion process (a bony projection on the shoulder blade [or, rather, scapula don't you know] – sounds like a cool name for a rock band)
• Popliteus (muscle on the back of the knee – cute)
• Quadratus lumborum (muscle in lower back – my favourite muscle to say; it sounds all rounded and satisfying in my mouth)
• Gout (a disease that fatties like Henry VIII get – I love its perfunctory shoutiness, like it’s telling you off for eating all the pies)
• Dwarfism and Gigantism (to do with an imbalance of the Human Growth Hormone – all very ‘does-what-it-says-on-the-tin-ish)
• Micturate – the feeling of needing a wee – so happy we have a word for this. From henceforth I shall often be heard saying, “I am so micturate right now.”
• And finally, it seems you are never too old to snigger at the following words: penis, vagina, sphincter and anus. Go on, have a little chortle, you know you want to….

Anyway, hopefully the next time I take to the keys I will be a qualified masseuse – fingers, or rather, phalanges crossed…

 

Dawning realisation

Warning: the positivity levels in this post may exceed critical threshold of cheesiness for the reader and thus may lead to a sense of mild nausea…

At around 4 am this morning, as I sat huddled on a plastic chair in a stranger’s garden wearing a head-torch, attached to all kinds of flashing pieces of expensive kit and generally looking like I was up to no good (don’t ask – well if you do, ask those blimmin’ bats), I listened to the crescendoing dawn chorus and felt a slow smile widen across my face.

Is there anything as joyous as hearing the birds rouse from their slumber and herald the new day with their jubilant melodies? If you’re somewhere rural, it tends to start with the fat goitre warblings of the wood pigeon, which my mum always said was them saying ‘My toe hurts Peggy’ (COMPLETELY random, I know, but try it – it works uncannily), closely followed by the intricate trills of the blackbird, the angry croak of the pheasant, the cheeky triplets of the thrush and the no-nonsense regularity of the chiff chaff. All together, the swelling symphony feels like one of nature’s indulgent gifts. Then the birds start moving in purposeful, arrow-straight lines – where are they all going on such earnest missions? To their favourite morning branch I guess.

Anyway, despite begrudgingly leaving the house at 2am to be there, I felt blessed to be in this cold garden with a numb bum, sat beneath the ghostly glow of a clump of hawthorn blossom, awaiting sunrise. Alongside the avian joy, I felt my own happiness bubbling up, and I had a realisation that I was in a very good place; that life felt really rather splendid. Yes, the sunshine helps in so many ways but, more than that, things are coming together in beckymayhem world. The law of attraction states that positivity attracts positive happenings, and this certainly seems to be playing out in my neck of the woods.

As dawn gently approached in tiny leaps of incremental lightening, I felt lights flicker on, both in the sky and in my mind, as I went through all the good things in my life at the moment.

The yoga classes are building and, more than anything, my love of teaching grows each week – I have found my ‘thing’ at last. This week I finished my final Thai massage case study and I have my final assessment next weekend and have already had my first paying customer, so hopefully that star will also rise soon. I have been offered a paid position teaching yoga at a beachside surf-yoga retreat in Morocco for six months – it’s slightly up in the air as to when I’ll start, but it feels very much the ‘right’ next step on my path to my dream career (focusing on how yoga benefits adventure sports such as surfing, biking, snowboarding and climbing). More on this in later posts no doubt. I am really enjoying the ecology mayhem and the flexibility that working from home offers me. And my personal life is brimming with happiness too, no doubt as a result of my own growing contentment.

I feel stronger than I’ve ever felt before and, like a massive cliche (cliches are there for a reason), I know that the happiness feels sweeter for having made it through difficult times and depression. It is too tempting to avoid cliches, but by imparting information solely from direct experience, I like to think that the personal truth cuts through any generic superficiality.

As I drove home after the survey, with the magic of the sun’s fiery furnace rising from red to yellow in the sky, my happiness grew as I took in the beautiful details that only a fantastic sunrise can give you: pink-hued may blossom dripping from hedgerow branches (yes I know, I’m obsessed with this plant); discombobulated pigeons and hares moving sleepily out of the way on country lanes; swathes of morning mist casting an opaque, milky filter across valley bottoms, cooling green to blue. Ben Howard’s silken lyrics, sweet strummings and haunting harmonies were the perfect backdrop to elevate my happiness to an acute sense of wonder at the world and a deep contentment about my place within it…

Anyway, enough already, I hear you groan - I will make sure that the next post is full of rage, negativity, swear words and bitter bile - hmmm, actually I am not sure I would be capable of such writing, but it would be an interested literary challenge!

Dublin sub-culture

As I sit and type this, watching the rain slide down the window outside, it seems incredible that I was sunning myself in glorious Dublin only three days ago. It was my first trip to Ireland and I was totally expecting rain – it’s Emerald for a reason…

My reasons for being there were as a last minute stand-in for a friend, who had bought tickets to the Lion King in Dublin as a grand romantic gesture for his girlfriend, just before they split up – d’oh. That’s a pretty expensive break-up precursor… There was a certain amount of subterfuge involved in the weekend, in order that his ex didn’t find out he’d gone anyway, and with another female, shock horror, but I’m pretty confident that my readership is sufficiently lowly to avoid any cats being let out of any bags (eek).

Knowing myself well, I knew that, although I would embrace and love being in the big city, there would inevitably come a moment where I craved the ‘great outdoors’, as I always do when I travel. As such, I arranged that on the first day we would head out to rural Ireland for an outdoor climbing course in the village of Dalkey, around half an hour south of Dublin. This all seemed fine in my head as I booked it, but the reality of arriving at our 10am appointment on time, after a 6:30am flight, soon hit me as being classic beckymayhem madness of the highest degree. Still, despite almost missing every form of requisite  public transport, we ended up being the first people there, waiting for the locals to amble in – me? Smug?!

Anyway, I could bang on about all the things we got up to, in the tone of a post summer holiday school English lesson essay when the teacher can’t be bothered to think of anything else for the students to do. However, I have already posted a photo-story of the weekend on facebook and, seeing as most of my readers are also likely to be facebook friends, I shan’t repeat the telling here. Suffice to say we ‘did’ Dublin – clocking up many miles of ambling through the streets and many hours of parking our bums on a piece of grass to soak up the totally unexpected sunshine. A brief list of highlights include: puffing away on a cigar in Pheonix Park, watching the Lion King meets Riverdance (added extras especially for the Irish audience), Guinness in the morning, fiddly-diddly live music everywhere, green postboxes, Euro-style pedestrian crossings, the beautiful harp bridge over the River Liffey, a gorse-strewn quarry and the joy of delicately  (and not so delicately) picking my way up a lump of rock, marvelling at acrobatic street artists, pretending to be sophisticated with the Dublin Beautiful People in a swanky art deco cafe (Cafe En Seine), friendly locals (a lady in Dalkey offered for us to use the loo in her own house!), meeting two men who make a living diving to search for dead bodies (they were, as you’d imagine, slightly sinister, but very chatty once on their favourite topic; the deterioration of human flesh in water and the various factors affecting the process), reliving last year’s travels with some al fresco yoga in a park and an amazing NZ-worthy flat-white coffee, finding a very funky cafe and having that lovely feeling of tessellation that sometimes occurs, where you feel instantly at home and, above all else, glorious SUNSHINE all weekend!

However, one thing that did pique my interest enough to blog about it is my slightly unusual approach to being a tourist in a new city. I am not interested in seeing all the ‘sights’ and in fact the idea of doing so makes me shudder slightly. Instead I like to wander around and soak up the atmosphere, people-watch, and begin to feel a sense of what makes the place and its residents tick and, especially, what makes it different from other places. Every village/town/city has its own ‘vibe’ and it’s this that I like to get to grips with. It often means I’m drawn to tiny details that other people miss but, conversely, means that I often miss the glaringly obvious attractions that many people come to a city to witness. This comes through in the photos I take – I often come away from an iconic city with a random assortment of photos that could, ostensibly, come from anywhere – often graffiti, people, food, signs… But, I’ve realised that, to my mind, these are the things that sum up that location’s particular ‘vibe’.

Having often berated myself in the past for my seeming disinterest in culture and apparent allergy to museums, I’ve learnt to appreciate my own take on things. I now realise that my approach is absolutely an interest in culture, but coming from a more oblique, under-the-radar angle. I don’t think either approach is better or worse than the other, they are just different, and the fact that people’s curiosity about a place manifests in various ways is only a good thing, especially if people then share their observations with others. We all need our eyes opening to other people’s way of viewing the world; there is no ‘correct’ world-view and acceptance of other approaches is key to harmony, open-mindedness and personal growth. So, with that in mind, please can someone give me a potted history of Dublin’s history and ‘must-see’ attractions and, in return, here is possibly the most random assortment of Dublin photos you’ll ever see – welcome to my world!

The darling bats of May

With a name like mine, I feel it is only right that my favourite month by far is May. There are many reasons for this, including, off the top of my head:

• The virginal froth of hawthorn blossom (also called May blossom, funnily enough)  covering hedgerows everywhere (admittedly it’s rather tardy this year, but it’s just about starting to burst into flower now). This heralds the beginning of the green and white summer uniform of British roadsides, as cow parsley lurks in the shadows, ready to take over with its nodding white umbels. (Botany is full of great words like ‘umbels’ – it must have the same root as umbrella, as it describes the umbrella-like shape of some flower-heads.)
• Omnipresent greenness – especially the bright, verdant flush that sweeps through the trees as their new leaves start to unfurl. It’s a month full of vibrant hope, optimism and new beginnings.
• The fact that urban pavements are festooned in the pink blossom of magnolia and cherry, as though preparing for the ultimate al fresco girl’s birthday party.
• The sun’s warmth (apart from this rather miserable year) and the feeling of excitement that comes from banishing the woolly knitwear to the back of the cupboard and unleashing the summer wardrobe. (However, I caveat this one by saying I always get it wrong – I don my flip flops at the first hint of spring sunshine, and then stubbornly refuse to go back to proper shoes regardless of any subsequent inclemency, even when my feet turn alarmingly white with purple and orange splotches.)
• Nature waking up and beginning to get jiggy, and I count humans amongst the rest of the native fauna in this – there are definitely more flirty looks and suggestively arched eyebrows abounding at this time of year.
• Bank holidays – duh.

However, over the last few years, May has also come to symbolise something less light and fluffy and happy – the start of the bat survey season, NOOOOOOOooooooooo! (Ecologists everywhere will be nodding sympathetically and emphatically right now.) Yep, those little winged critters wake from their winter slumber round about now, meaning that I will spend far too many hours over the next five months staring at roofs in the freezing cold, with my geeky detector, recorder and clipboard, wearing enough layers to double my width yet still shivering uncontrollably, and trying not to think of my friends lolling around in beer gardens or chatting around barbecues in the remnant evening sunshine.

Still, it’s not that bad really. The plus side of bat surveys is it gets you out and about on beautiful summer evenings, often to peaceful rural areas. I love watching the sun’s dying colours fade to a muted dusk and listening to the birds shout their parting diatribes, whilst sensing the rising energy of the nocturnal shift rousing itself as darkness approaches with incremental stealth. Spending such a large proportion of my summer as a nocturnal creature over the last few years has improved my night-vision immensely, and given me a love of being encased in what feels like the safe blanket of darkness. Darkness is not to be feared when you are out with the creatures of the night – you begin to think like a bat, feeling protected by your invisibility and enriched by the life that explodes into action once the sun goes down. Plus, there’s no denying it, bats are AWESOME, with their freaky faces, aerial acrobatics and ingenious echolocation skills.

So yes, I feel my personal nomenclature dictates that I belong to the month of May and, on balance, despite the antisocial hours they keep, I include those pesky bats as one of the blessings that this time of year yields.

Wild dog chase

I love my bike. It’s an old-school Kona Hahana mountain bike, and we’ve shared lots of adventures over our eleven years together. I’ve thrown it down the side of a hill in a tantrum in the Lake District, cycled to Devon on it using my Dad’s OS maps from the 1970s (discovering too late that many of the depicted country roads are now dual carriage-ways, doh), kicked it on more than one occasion (more tantrums – it’s a love-hate relationship…), stroked it lovingly on many occasions as we’ve shared a peaceful sunset somewhere beautiful after an awesome ride (now I sound weird), found myself in a bloody heap underneath it more times than I care to remember, especially in those early days of getting to grips with my SPDs (weird biking shoes that clip into the pedals, rendering you effectively attached to the bike; a fact that is easy to forget at first, leading to embarrassing slow motion sideways falls at traffic lights). Anyway, it’s been a blast.

As such, I have been feeling increasingly like a guilty, bad owner as I pass my bike in the garage, sadly mud-free. I can almost hear it sigh with disappointment every time I take to the saddle, only to end up trundling along a tarmac road a short distance to the supermarket or a yoga class again. “Where’s the single-track? Where’s the danger?” I hear it cry, shaking its pedals angrily. I also feel bad every time I return from a surf trip and re-install my board in the garage next to it, as though I’ve become an unfaithful partner, turning my affections to a newer, more fun model.

So, it was with a joyous, knowing twinkle in my eye that I took it out of the garage this Sunday, ignoring its silent reprimands, and chucked it into the back of a friend’s van. Getting muddy on my bike on some proper off-road single-track has been one of my new year resolutions, and I decided it was time to finally cross it off the list. Before long we had unloaded at Cannock Chase car park, and were ‘flying’ (in my head I was flying, in reality it was a ‘thirty-something who hasn’t been out on her bike for a while and has forgotten how hard/scary it is’ crawl) down steep slopes of narrow track on the purpose-built ‘Follow the Dog’ trail, weaving between trees, jumping over roots, skidding round switch-backs, launching off rocks, skimming over raised platforms (like I say, in my head I was certainly doing all these things). There were also some pretty evil uphill slogs, at which point I remembered something very strange about myself – I like going uphill. It’s where I come into my own, overtaking sweating men and just being all determined and ‘rock-woman’ about it. Don’t ask me where this slightly odd attitude comes from – I’m sure a psychoanalyst would have a field day. But I think I just like the physical and mental challenge – it’s most definitely ‘character-building’, that most detested phrases from school PE lessons.

As often happens when I’m embroiled in an all-encompassing physical activity, I marvelled at how it is impossible to be anywhere else than in the present moment when all your mental energies are focussed on preventing yourself from catapaulting through the air. It’s the sense of ‘here and now’ mindfulness that I strive to find in my yoga, yet so often instead find myself thinking about how my toenails need cutting or how pleasantly muscly the guy in front of me’s shoulders are or what I’m going to have for tea later, etc. It’s so much harder to be in the present moment when your sole attention is not fundamentally required, although all the sweeter when you attain that state amidst distraction. This inevitably comes from focusing on the breath, and I attempted to bring my yoga breath awareness to the bike ride too, encouraging my tense muscles to relax as I careered down steep slopes, teetering on the cusp of being in control. It definitely helped me to become more fluid and in tune with my bike. Other useful parallels between yoga and biking I noted were that the yoga core strength really helps with balance and I also appear to have yoga thighs of steel these days – you see, its sole application isn’t just tying yourself into freaky-looking knots! In fact, I am becoming increasingly interested in the specific benefits of yoga to different adventure sport activities – possibly more on this in later posts…

Anyway, it was a splendid day, and my bike has completely forgiven me for past insults now that we are both still finding mud on ourselves in unusual places – we are partners in grime once more…

All is forgiven – one happy, muddy bike.

Butcher versus Bard

This week, for some reason, my eyes and ears seem to have been particularly tuned into contrasts and juxtapositions. Here are some that have struck me:

• The contrast between the hectic craziness and complexity of carrying out my ecologist role versus the simplicity of yoga teaching. The former is summed up by the photograph below of the back of my car. All you need for the latter is a mat and enough space to fling a few limbs about.

Aaagh, the madness… (newt traps – aka plastic bottles and canes, ladder, high-vis, high-powered torch, wellies – such are the tools of one of my trades!)

This contrast adds variety to my life, which I so need, but can be challenging at times as I flick between the two. But, it has to be said, the distinction is not pure. There are of course moments of serenity in the outdoorsy life of an ecologist, which is why I entered the profession in the first place. Take this morning for example – having been up emptying newt traps and checking reptile mats since 7am, I found a moment of calm to stop work, lie back on some convenient decking adjacent to the tranquil River Avon and catch some rays on my pale winter skin, listening to the joyous bird chorus and hearing fish jumping in the lazy current next to me.

A serene sunset moment, whilst setting newt traps in a pond.

Staring up at the blossom whilst ‘working’ from a prone position.

Similarly, occasionally teaching yoga can be touched by chaos. For example, this evening I managed to spill half a litre of water inside my rucksack moments before class started. Inexplicably, I was carrying in said bag no fewer than four of the notebooks that I use for my compulsive scribblings, and all are now sodden, with my treasured words fading back into the nothingness from which they were once conjured. Sad times. It was an effort to retain a chilled zen-like state as I flapped around, draping notebooks over radiators and muttering about ‘lost words’ to the bemusement of my students. Then, adding an additional layer of mayhem, the shopping bag I was carrying on my handlebars disintegrated whilst I cycled home from the class, scattering a box of almond milk, expensive sunglasses and a bag of prunes across the road (random assortment, I know). I watched a car approach the flotsam at high speed, missing my sunglasses by millimetres and spectacularly spraying almond milk across the tarmac. Strangely beautiful.

• The second contrast is a little more concise, you’ll be pleased to hear. I was at the Stratford-on-Avon Literary Festival on Saturday, attempting to give my novel-writing efforts a motivational kick up the bum by attending a creative writing workshop. Whilst wandering the streets at lunchtime, feeling like a touristic microbe in Stratford’s teeming petri dish, my attention was caught by a group of tourists being shown the sights by no less than old Bill Shakespeare himself, even down to the the ridiculous Elizabethan pantaloons and the bald head with a wisp of hair. Suddenly, wherever I looked all I could see were truly awful Shakespeare puns and pointless tourist tat. I felt a little bit nauseous. Luckily, across the road, fluttering serenely on the breeze, I saw the following sign, bringing me back to reality from the cheesy faux Shakespearean world, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Thanks for keeping it real, Barry. 

I tried to think of a witty meat-based Shakespearean pun here but failed spectacularly apart from ‘When will we free meat again?’ Perhaps I now have a little bit more respect for the Stratford punners. Any ideas for good puns anyone?!

• Finally, and I believe this one is more of a juxtaposition than a contrast (correct me if I’m wrong), the following photo highlights a criminal example of unsympathetic town planning, with one of Stratford’s gems (Anne Hathaway’s cottage) being eclipsed by the 60s monstrosity that is the Shakespeare Centre:

Lathe and plaster versus concrete.

Theme-park history

Now, I am generally a very positive person who likes to celebrate the good things in life. However, today I am playing the part of ‘appalled from Leamington’ and feel the need to rant.

A friend came to visit me earlier in the week so, naturally, I took him to Warwickshire’s most famous attraction, Warwick Castle. It was my third visit there and, once again, I was struck by my sense of distaste and disappointment whilst wandering round the magnificent buildings and extensive manicured grounds.

There’s no doubt it’s impressive with its soaring towers and battlements, but there’s something about it that seems fake and plastic. The site is owned by Madam Tussauds and, perhaps it’s the subsequent prevalence of realistic waxworks scattered through the castle rooms that gives it this air of artificiality. However, it’s more than that. It’s as though they have tried to give it the feel of a theme park, and there are strong similarities to the absolute fakeness of Alton Towers; from the themed fast food joints painted to look like they’re made of stone, the speakers lurking in the flowerbeds that play out rousing, dramatic ‘battle’ music, the plastic astroturf delineating the prescribed paths that turn the tourists into IKEA zombies stumbling blindly through the grounds, and the audio and fake ‘smells’ that help to tell a cheesy narrative of the night before a big battle.

The irony of this is huge. It’s one of the best preserved castles in a country that has castles coming out of its ears (a castle coming out of your ear – that’s got to hurt). Yet they’ve managed to shrink this awe-inspiring structure into a mocking charicature of itself through corporate signage and commercial greed (after your £30 entrance fee you can then pay a not-insignificant extra amount to be scared  by ‘real actors’ in the dungeon or to visit a princess in the princess tower or to take the ‘Merlin tour’, linked in with the BBC programme – yuk…).

Through in-your-face efforts at recreating the past for a quick-fix, attention-deficit and consumer-heavy modern populace, they have ironically removed all of the castle’s inherent atmosphere. When I visit old buildings, what I love is the sense of history seeping through the walls and grounds that have seen so much. I love to find a peaceful corner and sit and imagine how the place would have looked and sounded and smelt in its heydey. I like to touch the places where the rock has been smoothed by centuries of previous palms and tread the corridors and steps that are hollowed by ancient footfall. I especially like ruins; I like to see nature and history vying for supremacy, enjoying the knowledge that nature will always win in the end, unfurling its ferny victory pennants from crevices in the stonework and spilling mossy blood onto the stone-flagged battle-fields. I like to let history speak for itself.

You can feel glimmers of this at Warwick Castle, for example by standing at the foot of the large earth mound that housed the original timber castle, now long gone and replaced by gnarly yews and oaks. But then you’re stung from your reverie by a loudspeaker instructing you to go and watch the ‘Trebuchet Fireball Extravaganza’ or by a shouty sign encouraging you to part with more cash to ‘test your archery skills’. It’s like a very expensive village fete, but without the heart-warming sense of community and home-made wholesomeness. There is very little space in the crowded grounds for contemplation and imagination; the castle’s story is shoved down your throat like a processed hot dog from a white van masquerading as a fortress.

Anyhoo, that said, the peacocks are beautifully odd, with their comical miaows, the battlement stairs provide a surprisingly vigorous cardio work-out, the river-side setting is stunning and, as we discovered, if you arrive after 3:30pm, you can pay half price to enter for the remaining hour and a half. It’s a good job we did that, otherwise I fear this would have been a ‘full-price’ double-the-length rant!

Fake robotic peacocks roam the grounds.