Small changes big gains

On holiday by the sea in summer 2015 I came across a newspaper article on swimming tuition for adults which got me thinking that here was something I might benefit from.

The gist of the piece was the increasing provision at leisure pools for lessons from beginner onwards for those people who had never learned as kids, or not learned enough technique to make them effective swimmers.

Until that point I had thought myself an average swimmer – however, looking back on it I was actually a bad breaststroke swimmer – you know the type – head high up to keep the water off hair which had to go back to an afternoon session at the office. I even wore glasses in the pool! I could easily do 60 lengths but would come out of the water with a tight lower back and a sore knee wondering why I didn’t feel any fitter as swimming was touted as being good all round exercise. Indeed, the knee problem would persist for several days after a session so I didn’t swim more than once a week, dwindling to nothing unless on holiday in reach of a swimming lake or better still, the sea.

After reading the article, I checked out adult swimming lessons in my area and found there was indeed such a thing and duly signed up to the improver session, spending four weeks on a waiting list.The lowest point of that first session was admitting that I couldn’t actually complete a full length of front crawl – half that distance would leave me gasping like a fish and in abject despair. I dragged myself exhausted from the pool at the end of the session and vowed to remember everything we had been shown for next time.

I had soon invested a princely £19 on a pair of prescription goggles which were amazing! Swimming with good technique and no goggles leaves you with very sore eyes so consider them a must for starters. A swimming cap keeps the hair from getting tangled in the goggles (and the hair out of the pool filters). I used nose-pinchers for six months before I realised that to breathe effectively I had to clear my lungs using both mouth and nose before I could take a new breath. I also quickly ditched the stylish swimsuit with a skirt which billowed about and slowed me down!

Good swimming is effective co-ordination. In breaststroke the hands sweep the water away to the sides and behind and the frogleg kick ends in a glide. The head goes into the water to the brow so it is not possible to keep the hair dry! I learned that my kick was not even and that I threw my left leg out to the side putting stress on my knee. It has taken many months to kick that habit. Getting the streamlined glide right has eliminated the strain on my lower back. So far so good!

Getting the hang of the front crawl has been a much longer job complicated by my much less than effective set of lungs. We were taught to breathe on every third stroke (apparently to get us used to being able to use left or right in the event of waves or other swimmers) but I still found myself fading much earlier than the others. A change of tutor at the end of this year came with a revelation – that I could actually breathe every other stroke thus giving me much more oxygen to play with. Suddenly I was much faster and making real gains. The extra confidence piqued my interest in the possibility of achieving a promotion to the ‘Be a great swimmer’ class who train alongside us and power up and down the lanes, seemingly effortlessly.

The upshot has been visits to the competition pool twice a week for an hour at a time to work on my technique using hand float and pull buoy (sits between your knees) as well as the Saturday morning lesson. I’ve even invested in training fins but the need to avoid running other slower swimmers down from behind means I have to choose my times carefully – quiet lanes are the holy grail of every swimmer, fast or slow and are not generally available for long.

I spend time studying technique on Youtube which teach that the angle of the hands and the bend of the elbow to the sweep of the forearm is all crucial in front crawl as is the type of kick which keeps the body streamlined without being heavy on oxygen use.
All in all, the whole experience has been fascinating but I was unprepared for huge gains in fitness, particularly in the big jump in core strength which has eliminated ten years of lower back problems and the pain I had acquired in both knees as I sat or stood. I had wrongly attributed my poor joint health to the onset of middle-age and now seem to have reversed it.

The downside of all this is finding space in busy pools, accidentally ingesting lots of water, and the odd kick and scratch when I and fellow swimmers don’t avoid each other effectively enough. Oh, and the chlorine!

The last time I swam in the sea I had expected to be able to lazily power myself along like a channel swimmer. Unfortunately, the moment I looked down at the unknown depths beneath me with my fantastic goggles I chickened out imagining electric eels and Portugese Man O War appearing out of the gloom below and swam head up breaststroke for the rest of the swim. I need to work on that…!

The trouble with books

Last night I visited my local library for an urgent meeting called by the villagers in an effort to recruit volunteers to help run the service thus making it cheaper and possibly protect it from cuts coming our way.

It was pointed out at the meeting that libraries are not one of the essential services that have to be run by law by local councils and are consequently now at risk.  I know why this is the case but it doesn’t make it any easier to take for someone who grew up surrounded by books and who knows the value of this.

E-readers and computers have opened up endless access to word sources, but these are never going to be able to replace the look and feel of pages and the place they have in our lives.

My own love of books started at an early age and I eagerly read everything I could lay my hands on.  Living out in the countryside meant that my own access to new reading matter was the library in the town where I went to school.

I quickly discovered that I could use the library in Otley on my way home and I quickly exhausted the upstairs children’s selection and embarked on the much more interesting downstairs.  I was soon halted by one of the librarians who questioned my choice of a Norman Mailer novel as being too adult.  I was then told that at 13 I would require a note from my parents to enable me to continue borrowing adult books.  Thankfully this rule was quickly forgotten and, as far as I know, I never took a note.  I would easily get through three or four books a week and read all over the house, in my bedroom, in whatever room was empty at the time, and better still, pack up a book, a drink and an apple and head off to the fields for the day to spend idly under a tree whilst the author of the day transported me completely.

A neighbour noticed my interest and lent me a copy of the Hobbit which I finished in record time.  He then announced in a sonorous voice that he had ‘deeper and darker’ books for me to read!  And what a fantastic introduction that was to the world of Tolkein’s elves, wights, orcs and ents and the start of a reading habit that would see me commence the whole sequence of Lord of the Rings on the first day of the summer holidays every year for the next 15.

Since then my literary adventures have included Matrix style heroes, light and dark  elves of all descriptions, fey rock stars and country singers, elderly detectives investigating the paranormal, a copper who uses magic, a great many demons who have crossed to the light and some who haven’t, detective monks, a midnight mayor of London, ex-reporters who moonlight as private eyes and an exorcist female vicar, as well as your Jane Austens, George Elliots and Thomas Hardys.  My favourite authors include William Gibson, Roger Zelazny, David Guterson and Marilyn Robinson, the exuberant urban fantasist Kate Griffin, Christopher Fowler, Graham Joyce, David Kelly and Ben Aaronovitch and many many more.

Although I own an e-reader it is mainly for holidays where transporting luggage is an issue but the cost is the down side.  I still love being able to browse a library selecting books through look, weight, and age as well as by recommendation.

My choice of career in journalism and press work was influenced by writing and I know that libraries played a huge part.  I would hope that this valuable service can be retained, even if we end up having to run it ourselves.

 

Story-writing practice….

As part of participation in an OU fiction-writing course I’m going to be using my blog to test out some story ideas. Constructive comments are welcome. Please let me know if you enjoy any of them.

“You need a sauna.”
The comment came from behind me as I stood in the chemist shop snuffling hard and asking for cold medication. I turned to see a shape hunched over a stick clutched tightly in yellowing fingers. The chin was foreshortened by a lack of dentures or viable teeth and this vision was topped by a traditional Yorkshire flat cap. I sneaked a quick look through the glass to see if there was a sheepdog or whippet tethered outside but I was disappointed.
“Sauna’s the best thing” he repeated. “Steam it all out.”
I smiled and agreed whilst wondering what his experience was as he must have been pushing 90.
And that was my first encounter with old Eric, a man who never ceased to surprise me throughout our unlikely 12 month friendship. His coat was at least two sizes too big and I suspected came from a charity shop as I couldn’t see how his frame could have shrunk so far. His shoes looked like they had been worn for decades and were missing laces and socks. His shirt was also much too big for his slight frame and from it peeked a vest so stained it would probably have stood up on its own and made a break for freedom. But where one would have expected an odour of old biscuit crumbs and frying, I could detect nothing but a scent of earth and pine….

Can we afford to turn our backs on renewable energy?

As we come to the end of the first term of the Coalition government it’s a good time to look closely at some of the ‘Green’ credentials claimed by Cameron – remember that Husky picture!

More recently Tory ire has been generally levelled at windfarms with the threat to remove subsidies if they win the next election http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/apr/24/tories-scrap-wind-farm-subsidies. The arguments are usually on the lines of ruining our ‘green and pleasant land’ ie the view. The ire vented at any wind turbine application, however small, is quite extraordinary. The arguments range from the familiar NIMBY complaints, to the dangers of turbines exploding in gales (very rare), or that the wind doesn’t blow enough for them to be reliable producers.

A small three-turbine plan put together locally by a community co-operative – Valley Wind http://www.valleywind.coop/ – for an area of windswept moorland is again being objected to, mainly on the grounds of ruining the view. If the plan is approved it will provide power for around 4,700 homes and give local people a chance to buy their power at a more reasonable level as well as generating it in a cheap and clean manner.

I’ve been walking in the high moors over the last month and have only really noticed turbines when I have sought them out. I could count nine including the collection towards Birdsedge. The moors above Bradford have had a large group for a number of years now and one tends to tune them out when out and about. Farm turbines are a common sight and have merged into the landscape whilst the benefits to the farm business is huge.

The western Lake District holiday cottage my family has visited for years has recently acquired the benefit of a turbine. It could get damp in the winter and the power was on a coin meter, however, a recent visit was much warmer and drier thanks to a small wind turbine on the hill above the farm of which the house is a part. Such was the turbine’s efficiency, the power no longer had to be charged for. A visit to Barra in June showed another community turbine not only providing much needed power to an isolated community, but running so efficiently they were making money from it.

Last year I spent a week on the Scottish Isle of Eigg which famously took control of its own future through a community buy-out of the whole island from its previous non-local landowner. Since then the islanders have looked closely at what they could do to make themselves more independent and this has led to the installation of four wind turbines and more recently a small solar farm to complement its earlier investment in hydro electric power http://islandsgoinggreen.org/. Eigg has become quite famous across the world for the way community members assessed what they needed and continue to tackle the issue. Yes, grants were needed but this is a small island community who would not otherwise have been able to make themselves self sufficent.

A family holiday on the neighbouring Isle of Muck some years ago was enlightening for the kids as the island only had one turbine and when the wind dropped the power ceased. To supplement what the turbine could produce diesel generators were run at peak times in the morning and evenings. This meant that any baking had to be done to coincide with these. As bread had to come through a tortuous ferry ride from the mainland I taught the kids how to make breadrolls and we baked them in the evening peak and ate them the following day. It was a great lesson for the children in not relying on energy and working out where it comes from.
First world countries take energy for granted – we are used to it being there when we want it and where we want it. Those of us who were around during the miner’s strikes and the three-day week in the 70s know what it is like in the winter when there are blackouts. These were marketed very effectively to help wipe out our own coal industry as expensive and unreliable and sell us nuclear power despite its risks and the fact it can’t effectively dispose its own waste safely.

Japan and Germany are closing their plants for good because of that safety risk so why is the UK blithely carrying on? Germany was investing heavily in renewables before the Fukishima nuclear accident so phasing out their nuclear plants was the next step. They are now generating a considerable amount through renewable sources, so why is the UK government dismissing the contribution that renewables can have to generating clean and free power. Wind, solar and tidal power will not have such a permanent effect on the landscape as a failed nuclear reactor. And nuclear power generation is being farmed out to foreign commercial producers – EDF is a subsidiary of a French company. Is this a good idea – think Russia and the Ukraine pipeline!
Renewable power infrastructure need not have a long term effect on the countryside as it can be removed in all cases – very hard to do that with a nuclear power station.

Solar renewables are also now attracting negative publicity, again by those people who ‘own’ the view! Tory Eric Pickles has recently vetoed a solar farm in the south of England, again on the grounds of ruining the view and taking farmland out of use http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/10883759/Eric-Pickles-ruling-kills-off-large-scale-solar-farms.html. Both these reasons are spurious – most solar farms can’t readily be seen as they are situated on flat ground, and they can be removed. If we gave such weight to ‘valuable farm land’ why are we allowing our supermarkets to put British farmers out of business by demanding such low prices that they are virtually uneconomical, and also by allowing cheap imports to similarly damage the rural economy.

Small communities like those in Scotland have shown that using renewable power can be done. Yes there are problems when the wind isn’t blowing or drought limits the effectiveness of hydro – but can we not at least put more investment in so it is there when it is possible to use it (which is most of the time in a maritime climate like ours)? More research needs to be done to create a way of storing power when it is generated for use when it is needed. I am sure this will be possible but as it will cut the revenues of the big energy companies, that research isn’t being given priority -if it happens it will revolutionise the way communities can organise themselves to be self sufficient from companies which seek to maximise their own profits before providing good services.

Green and pleasant land

My last point is that we need to start to get out of the mindset that power should be cheap. We should do more to rein in our energy use, produce what we can at community level, and work towards power storage solutions.

Good luck to Valley Wind and others like them. And as a lesson to those Tories who support Victorian values, do you really think our Victorian forefathers would have passed up the chance for free power if they had the technology in those days? I think not!

Not my house

NOT MY HOUSE

Moving is said to be one of the most stressful things that you can do and, judging from my experience earlier this year, it really is!

I wore my first house like an old coat. The longer I had it the shabbier it got and but the thought of shedding it for something newer filled me with trepidation. The comfort of the known is a difficult habit to break and even the thought of it was unsettling at first.

After 25 years I had persuaded my three menfolk that granny’s bequest would be best spent on upgrading to a bigger house. This didn’t mean moving out of the neighbourhood and we shifted a full third of a mile up the hill to a newer estate near Meltham Golf Course

My new house is circa 1979/1980 and is the most modern place I have ever lived in. I was born in a Victorian house in what is now Trafford and used to be Cheshire. Early years were in a pre war semi in London and then up to aged 23 in an Edwardian era house in a village between Otley and Harrogate. Various addresses since then were short term lets in Victorian terraces in Harrogate and Leeds and finally to the first Meltham address which was identified as being built in 1897.  We moved there from a flat in Leeds with my brother driving a large box van containing all our possessions which, apart from the washing machine which we had inherited from a relative, came from various charity shops and flea markets.

Our first purchase of a double bed for our new home had to return to the shop as we had failed to think of measuring the bulk head on the stairs and the blasted thing would not go under it. It took three weeks for our fridge to arrive so we kept milk and other stuff on the top of the cellar stairs.

The house was the end terrace of a long row which had been built in 1897 to accommodate employees of the nearby dyeing works which were still operating until less than a decade ago. Every now and then when the wind blew in a particular direction the smell of urea would flood the area and we had to keep windows and doors closed. The mill inevitably closed and a few years ago the mill chimney disappeared one weekend closely followed by the rest of the mill. A housing development is now planned to take its place.

We had a small garden but this was the only one on our side of the street so we were always the hosts of the after school and weekend football games when the lads were at the primary school at the bottom of the road.

The kitchen was my favourite room as it caught the sun for most of the day. The sitting room, on the other hand, was generally dark and seemed to trap the cold. This was fine in the summer when it became the room of choice, but during the winter months it took a lot of heating and the draughts blew through from the cellar and from under the skirting boards where there was an ancient system of gas pipes, the only evidence of which was a gas mantle fitting still on our bedroom wall.

I wasn’t keen on the cellar – laterly I worried about its dampness. Outside and along the whole gable end was a deep drain with an iron work grille. It was only during various cloudbursts that we realised that, as the end house, all the floodwater coming down from Royd Edge must have hit our home first and the drain must have been retro-fitted to cope with the deluges. The drain had become redundant before we moved in as a garden had been made from an unused area of hard standing which had been appropriated by the previous occupant. My long-standing neighbour had lived in his house since the 70s and could remember lfootballs being bounced against the gable end prior to this with the vibrations reverberating several doors down. Storm bursts during our residence resulted in a large pile of sand and small stones against the side of the kerb which we nicknamed ‘the beach.’

And then we moved!

The house sale seemed to take ages and the buyer eventually demanded that the whole thing be concluded in three days which gave us a very short time to remove 25 years of detritus including a whole loft full. We are nine months on now but the new owners have yet to take up residence.
I still visit my former neighbour as he is now in his eighties and recently widowed. We have 25 years behind us as friends and I take him vegetables and soft fruit from my allotment which I have to pass the old house to get to. This makes it hard to uncouple from my former home which I hate seeing unlived in and unloved – and so does my neighbour whose garden would win prizes if there were such things locally. The grass was cut just once this year and the little patch of garden under my former kitchen window is ragged and unkempt and disappearing underneath the weeds. Other acquitances on my old street have stopped me to talk and ask if I know what is happening to which I reply “It’s not my house.” However, I itch to cut the hedge and groom the grass but I can’t because it’s no longer mine to do so.

A friend once told me she visited a former address and on leaving, picked up the door mat and shook it outside. It was an involuntary action but done out of years of habit. I have to resist the urge to pull the weeds from the top of the wall and shut the gate tight to stop the neighbouring dogs getting in.
I’ve now been a resident at my new address since January and as comfortable living goes, I can’t fault the new place. Another former neighbour who expressed his horror when seeing our ‘for sale’ board said he preferred the ticks and creaks of old houses and couldn’t see himself living in a newer one. However much I miss the old house and its familiarity I love the amount of light in my new sitting room and I don’t miss the draughts, or the occasional visiting mouse. I also don’t miss the twice daily visit of the school run ‘hurtling mothers’ as I called them who used our two streets as a loop to run their cars up and down whilst picking up their kids. My new address remains quiet at those times and for this I am also thankful.

As to the old house, my theory is that when the kids of the new owner are safely in the local high school the house will come back on the market and my old neighbour will once again have someone to talk to over the wall.

Stepping into the dark

I managed three whole days as a beach bum. I had dropped my youngest off at Stirling University and headed out west in my longest single drive ever – nine hours. Mid September on the North West coast of Scotland proved unexpectedly warm and balmier than some of the past August holidays I have spent at that particular location. The shell sand beaches between Morar and Arisaig have seen many visits between the late 60s and now, but this was my first time solo.
The beach was as quiet as I remembered from the very early days before it became famous as the setting for the film Local Hero. The holiday season was effectively over with the last few families with pre-schoolers the only ones on the campsite. And there lay the interesting bit. Once those breath-taking sunsets had burned their way down behind the isle of Rhum the gloom gathered very quickly and by 8pm if was full dark. I spent the evenings sitting in the car reading by torchlight and listening to the radio. After three days I had demolished all my reading material except three books which I had picked at random in the library and now proved to be rather too visceral to be reading on my own in the dark on a near deserted rural campsite!
The radio was full of heated debate about the coming referendum and was getting to such a pitch I felt that I didn’t want to listen anymore. What was coming across loud and clear was people’s need for information and a greater need for reassurance in making their decision – neither was there for them. Every overheard coversation in the shops of Mallaig and the cafes and streets of Fort William showed a population agonising at being forced to make such a momentus decision and feeling not well-informed enough to make it. The whole place was in a ferment and I did not envy them.
I decided to run slowly home through the Lake district and follow the result from the comfort of my sofa. What I saw reflected what I had heard on the streets – the no voters voted no because there was simply not enough info on the nuts and bolts of how an independent Scotland would operate. As the comedian Steve Punt succinctly put it: “Salmond had the answers but couldn’t show his working.” I feel sad for Salmond who had made independence his life’s work and I had followed his progress for many years. To lose at this stage must had been incredibly hard and he did it with dignity. Salmond was gracious in defeat and I hope this is maintained by the whole independence movement.

Sunset over the Western Isles

Stepping into the dark without being able to see where you are going requires a massive leap of faith and a big ask for an entire country. I can thoroughly understand why they didn’t go through with it.

Stepping off the treadmill

I’ve finally done what I have been screwing my courage to do for six months now – that is leave the security of a job I have done for nearly three decades.

‘Security’ probably isn’t a description that my former colleagues would appreciate as local government is currently in a huge period of flux and the prospect of such change was one of the factors in my decision. My health is another consideration and I am not getting any younger and felt the start of a loss of the resilience I once had to cope with everything that came my way and keep all the balls in the air!

So I am out! Tomorrow I pay off the mortgage and that makes all this possible. One of the endowment crisis generation, I made a decision some years ago to keep up with the payments as well as switch to repayment mortgage and this has now matured and paid off what we owed!

And life on the outside?

I could say that I will stay in bed more but my wakeful day starts around 5am regardless of how I try to reset my lark of a body clock. I will still use these early hours on the laptop to spy on the world and catch up with my friends whilst dawn is still a glimmer in the new day’s eye.

As I wake now the spread of dawn seems slow and will get slower as we head towards October when the changing of the clocks seriously messes up my internal one.

I have traditionally dreaded this artificial construct in March and October which overrides the rhythm of the seasonal changes of dark and light. Humankind holds this at bay with technology, whether rushlights, candles or electricity and there is no escaping it unless one goes completely off grid and takes no notice of society’s imposition of time.

And that brings me to a luxury I have just discovered. On losing my watch somewhere last week, I spent four days not really aware of the actual time and realised that, apart from appointments (and my husband’s wake up alarm), I don’t really need to know….