Reality check: the headbutted-by-a-cat edition cat 🐈 in Hot town, summery in the city - 2017

WHERE: I’m in bed having a very rare lie in. On my lap is Oreo, the black cat. She gets up periodically to headbutt me, just to remind me that she’s there and hasn’t been fed yet but it’s Saturday morning and not even 7am yet (I did say lie-in, not sleep-in!). Outside the birds are singing their hearts out and I can’t hear much traffic which is a sound that always takes me back to childhood. I grew up in a semi rural area with a long back garden full of trees, bushes and a long beech hedge. It was always (and still is) full of birds who went crazy as it got light. It’s a lovely, nostalgic feeling for me.

WEARING: apart from the cat? I’m wearing four rings, a 4Ocean bracelet, a Save the Turtles bracelet, an Ehlers Danlos awareness bracelet and an LGBT+ awareness bracelet (although its rainbow has faded to a pretty pastel 😂). I also have my tree of life necklace, a silver ring in my belly button and five earrings in various parts of my ears. Oh, and a 1995 Jacksonville Jazz Festival T Shirt because it’s extra large and keeps me warm on cold nights like last night.

FITNESS UPDATE: after I had a flu like virus over Christmas my running really took a hit. I’m still struggling with longer distances (my brother and I headed out to run six miles last Sunday and I ended up walking quite a lot if it. I’m going to try for six again tomorrow (as long as my sore throat doesn’t suddenly develop into an evil chest infection)). However, I’m getting the odd mile in under 10 minutes on my shorter runs. Also, I spent the last six months of last year eating sugar like a kid in a candy shop with no supervision… 2 stone (28lbs or 13kg) later I realised something had to give. I’ve lost 10lbs so far which also helps the running.

IN THE NEWS: am I the only one who actively tries to avoid the news now? I really feel like everything is plummeting towards shit and feel incredibly ostrich-like about it. A Lot of the UK is under water following two huge rain/wind storms which just feels like a harbinger of global warming to me. Politics is a pile of rich bastards rolling roughshod over the also rans, the every day folk: you and me. People being shot, people being stabbed, terrorist attacks being planned. Hate, hate, hate. Just living in a world of hate and mistrust. I need another planet.

READING: in 1994 I moved to Jacksonville, Florida. I went two days before my 24th birthday so my family gave me some presents to take with me. One of those was a book given to me by my older sister and it’s called The Great American Bus Ride by Irma Kurtz. She’s better known as the Cosmopolitan agony aunt; an American who settled in London. She has worked for Cosmo for over forty years and is now in her 80s. So, in the early 90s she took a small bag containing a change of pants, some trail mix and a book, a notebook and a pen before commencing a journey around the contiguous USA on the Greyhound bus. I read it about once a decade and it is an absolute favourite. I have travelled a bit on greyhound myself, just in Florida, and have a few stories to tell from my experiences too. I closed the book last night just after she escaped from Dinosaur, Colorado. She wasn’t captured or anything, the name intrigued her so she got off the bus at 4am to discover there is very little there, other than a couple of life size dinosaur statues and a gas station. The manager of said gas station was suspicious of this rather scruffy lady hanging about in her store all day, waiting for the next greyhound outta there so Irma, for the only time in her journey, resorted to removing a magazine from the rack, opening it the appropriate page, pointing at the photo and saying, “Look, that’s me!” The manager then took Irma to dinosaur national park and then to the next big town in order to catch a bus onto the next part of her journey. One ongoing thing I like about this book is that I still love her outlook on life. As I’ve grown older, I find that I start disagreeing with things I’ve appreciated when younger but Irma Kurtz’s thought processes, while spending nights in bus stations and days watching the American landscape slide by, are still close to my heart.

ACTIVITIES TODAY: Rich is going to Reading to visit a friend, T wants me to dye her hair half green and half yellow. Dyeing her hair causes her enormous stress so that will be fun!

THINKING ABOUT: what to write here and how long I can stay in bed until my belly screams at me for breakfast!

PLANNING: I need to buy cat food and plan tomorrow’s meals. I also need to run a whole six mile tomorrow.... a few months ago six miles was a short run! Hey Ho!

Oh, btw, I’m going to have another article printed in Like The Wind magazine which comes out soon 🙂