Walking away from my desk

Friends with conventional jobs often say that they wouldn't have the discipline to work from home. I think they imagine me lounging around in my pyjamas and watching daytime TV. To be honest, after almost 20 years of freelancing, I probably suffer more from the opposite problem. Especially when I'm busy with several projects at the same time and deadlines are coming thick and fast, the greater danger is in spending too long at my desk.

As an RSI sufferer, I've always been conscious of taking regular breaks and yes, going downstairs to the kitchen to make a cup of tea and maybe hang the washing out while I wait for the kettle to boil is a good way to take those much-needed regular physical breaks from a focused, tense posture at my desk. It's not enough on its own though. Last winter, I found myself 'home alone' with my partner working abroad for a few months and with grey, uninspiring weather outside, it was all too easy to spend all day at my desk and some days to not leave the house at all. Going out for regular daytime walks was already a part of my routine, but one that tended to slip when the weather was bad or when I had a deadline looming or was just feeling a bit low and couldn't be bothered.

#wetwalking

#walk1000miles2019

Then friend and ELT colleague, Karen White told me about a walking challenge to walk 1000 miles during the calendar year (that's about 1600km). It's a semi-organized thing which you can sign up for or which you can just decide to do individually and you can set your own rules about what counts. I already walk quite a bit generally because I don't own a car and walking is the main way I get about. What I needed though was to get out regularly for conscious breaks that were just about walking and fresh air and clearing my head, not nipping to the supermarket to get some groceries. So I decided to log just those 'proper' walks using an app on my phone.

To do 1000 miles in a year works out at around 83 miles a month or 20 miles a week or 3 miles a day.  From where I live I can do a walk of just over 3 miles around Bristol harbour which takes me between 45 mins and an hour depending on how fast I walk and whether I stop en route to take photos or get stuck crossing roads. That doesn't sound too difficult until you realize you need to do that EVERY day .... you miss a day and you have to fit in 6 miles the next!

My regular route

I've just reached the two-thirds point in the year and so far I'm bang on target with 669 miles walked to the end of August. Looking back at my stats, I don't generally manage to walk every day, but I typically fit in my 20 miles a week spread over about 5 days. The missed days tend to be when I just can't fit in a walk because of other commitments in the day. I also swim twice a week and I can't always justify an hour out of my working day to swim and an hour to walk, although I do have some swim+walk days.  And although I do walk in all weathers, I am occasionally put off when it's really heaving with rain.

I mostly do my regular route around Bristol harbour just because I can go out on autopilot without having to plan. And it's a great route with so many different things to see, people to watch and stuff going on. I've developed a few other regular routes too, including a couple of good 5-milers for when I need to catch up on my mileage. 

A snowy harbour walk

Cranes and a steam train on a grey day

Always something to see in Underfall boatyard

A sunny day on the harbour

The #walk1000miles2019 challenge has definitely kept me motivated to keep it up as has sharing my walking with friends on social media and via the #StetWalk hashtag on Twitter which aims to encourage editors and writers to get out and away from their desks - 'stet' being an editing term meaning 'let it stand'. 

Has it made a difference? I think it has. It definitely kept me from slipping into depression through some of the more miserable, lonely winter months. Not only did the actual walking and fresh air often perk me up and give me a sense of achievement, but coming up with suitable photos to share on social media - even if they were rather grey and soggy - gave me a reason to stay connected.

It was helpful during a lull in work at the start of the year, giving me a regular activity to plan my days around. And more recently through a particularly busy, full-on patch of work juggling numerous different projects, when it felt like I had a hundred things whizzing around my head, an hour out walking often either let me switch off completely and come back and start afresh or else it helped me settle everything back into order and get stuff back in perspective.

Will I be doing #walk1000miles2020? Probably not, but I'll definitely be trying to keep up the habit for the sake of both my physical and mental health.

A New Society of Authors Bristol Group

Yesterday evening, I went along to the first meeting of the new Society of Authors Bristol Group. I’ve been a member of the Society for more than 10 years and I try to go along to their events when I can, but they’re often in London, which is a bit of a trek unless I can combine it with something else. So I’m quite excited at the prospect of something more local.

As ever, it was a fascinating mix of writers from different fields, with several novelists, a writer for young adults, a ghost-writer, one other ELT writer like myself, plus people who’ve written plays, short stories and poetry. The mix, inevitably, makes these events slightly less focused than the ELT groups I’m part of, but over the years, there have been all kinds of useful snippets that I’ve taken away from SoA events and I’ve got to meet lots of interesting people.

As this was the first meeting, it was all about discussing how we want the group to work. Three local SoA members, Jonathan Pinnock, Margot Arendse and Jean Burnett, helped to set things up and Anna Ganley from the SoA came along to talk about the work she does helping set up and support other local SoA groups. Rather rashly, I offered to write this post as a summary of the first meeting. I didn’t take any notes, so don’t expect perfect minutes, but hopefully, I can just summarise some of the main points. Here goes …

Where and when?

We met at The Square, in Berkley Square, Bristol, a private members club which the group has membership of, for the next year at least, to allow us to use a room there for our meetings. They have comfy chairs, a bar and disabled access via a lift.

The initial plan is to have meetings every two months, with the next in January, probably at a similar early-evening time – we met at 7 and went on until nearly 9.

Who?

The group is open to any SoA members in the area. Although it’s been set up as SoA Bristol, there was general agreement that we would like to include members from Bath and from the surrounding area as well. Although the bi-monthly meetings will probably be in Bristol for now, we talked about the possibility of arranging some meetings or events in Bath too.

What?

The big question then remained as to what we want the group to do. I won’t try to cover all the specific suggestions here, but as we have a diverse membership, we discussed covering a mix of topics to appeal to everyone. We talked about having different speakers both from local contacts and organized via SoA HQ. We also spoke about how the group can be a hub for people to meet and then maybe arrange their own smaller groups (formally or informally) with a particular special interest. I’m certainly keen to get together a local Educational Writers group in some form. We discussed how the group might become involved in wider events, such as the current Bristol Festival of Literature, or arrange events to involve an audience of non-members, readers, etc. And we all agreed that as well as speakers and organized events, the social aspect of the group should be key too. Cheers to that!

Next steps

Based on the ideas already put forward, the group organizers are planning to put together some form of questionnaire to send out to all SoA members in the area to ask for their input. So if you’re an SoA member in  the general Bristol and Bath area, do look out for that and please take the time to fill it out.

In the meantime, there’s already a Bristol Society of Authors Facebook page. It’s a closed group, which means that you click on the button to ask to join. Hopefully, this will become a place to share not just news of the group’s activities, but also links to other things going on locally of interest to members. And if you’re on Twitter, I’ve started a #SoABristol hashtag to use and follow.

I came away excited about the possibilities for the group and I’m already planning to meet up for a coffee with a writer I met who lives nearby #lovenetworking

Jelly!

Today I went to my first Jelly! Jelly is a co-working event where freelancers take their laptops and go along to work for the day alongside other people. I've been feeling a bit unmotivated and stuck in a rut lately, so I thought perhaps a change of location and a bit of contact with other freelancers might perk me up.

So how did my first Jelly go? Well, here are a few of the pros and cons:

Pros:

• It was fun having something in my diary to look forward to and break up the week.
• I got to 'dress up' a bit - I didn't want to go over the top, but went for a favourite shirt with my jeans instead of one of the usual pile of t-shirts.
• It was very cool to walk to work for a change. It was a beautiful autumn morning and I got to walk through an area of town I don't normally go to.
• I did get on with quite a bit of work without all the usual distractions.
  
• It was nice to meet new people, although that was rather limited by the fact that no one else turned up ...

Cons:

• Sadly, it turned out to be just me and Penny, the event organiser, so not quite the sociable, buzzy atmosphere I'd hoped for! Although Penny was really nice, it did feel a bit awkward sitting in a big empty room with just one other person.
• I had to transfer a load of stuff onto my laptop which I don't generally use to work on and I couldn't take with me the big set of proofs I'm working with at the moment.
  
• Because of all my health issues, I'm used to my careful desk set-up, with comfy chair, monitor at the correct height etc., so working on my laptop at not quite the right height, on a rather uncomfortable chair in a slightly chilly room wasn't ideal. Wilder St Studio where the event took place is a multi-functional space, used as a dance studio, rehearsal space, etc. and although it's nice and bright, it's probably not quite my idea of a comfy workspace.
  

I felt a bit too self-conscious to take any photos myself, so this one's from the Wilder St website.

• I'm also used to breaking up my working day, taking regular breaks and pottering about the house doing stuff when I'm not at my desk. So sitting in front of my laptop for 3 hours straight felt a bit odd. I certainly couldn't have managed a whole day of it, thus, I gave up at lunchtime and excused myself.

Overall, although today's event probably wasn't quite what I'd hoped for, I still like the idea of co-working. I'll definitely keep an eye open for similar events in the future and I'll give it another go.

The circus comes to town

As it's been a beautifully sunny afternoon - and I'm still waiting for work to come through - I thought I'd wander down to the harbourside to take a look at the media circus that's landed on Bristol for tonight's leaders' debate, being hosted at the Arnolfini. When I got down to the city centre, I was actually rather surprised by how few people there were about. Ordinary people that is - the area was swarming with men in dark suits, armed police and media types talking into their mobile phones or doing pieces to camera along the waterfront. On my way down, I'd been half thinking of appropriately intelligent comments on politics and politicians just in case anyone with a microphone should come up to me, but I didn't bump into Brown, Clegg or Cameron and none of the media types seemed to want my woman-in-the-street opinion today. I enjoyed the sunshine though as I sat on a wall watching the police boat patrol up and down, machine guns at the ready in case of any false move from a passing swan!

Good news and bad news

A couple of things have come up in the past few days that follow on from recent blog posts, so I thought I'd post some updates.

Libel reform: After my interest in libel reform was piqued by the Big Libel Gig last month, I was quite excited to see the latest ruling in the Simon Singh case. Very briefly, he's a Guardian journalist who was sued for libel after questioning some of the claims made by chiropractors. The latest court ruling isn't the end of his battle, but he has been allowed to use the defence of "fair comment" to justify his article. To use a well-worn cliche, it feels like a small victory for common sense.

Grafitti: On a less positive note, I was horrified on Friday when I walked along the lane and noticed that someone has painted over the beautiful typewriter grafitti that I featured in my late-but-one post. The whole section of wall has now been painted a rather boring grey. I know that grafitti is, by its nature, ephemeral and that's part of its appeal, but to destroy such a clever and inoffensive piece of art still seemed criminal. The only silver lining though is that after posting the picture on the blog, I was contacted by someone who runs a website featuring Bristol street art and asked to contribute my typewriter photo to the site. I don't think it's gone up on the site yet, but hopefully, it will be preserved there for others to enjoy.