I spent much of June on holiday, my longest break in years, visiting Jake and Scarlett in Wales. The plan was to spend some time helping to renovate an old school into an arts centre. Doing physical tasks day after day took its toll, but I enjoyed the change of work. It was a very good break.
June also included my 50th birthday, celebrated while I was in Wales. It is strange to reach an age that once seemed so remote. The main change is that I’m aware of having less time left. It’s time to get on with the things that actually matter.
Before going on holiday, I managed to get my weight under control, and then didn’t track it while I was away. I’ve spoken again and again in the last year about needing to focus on getting fit, and crossing the threshold of 50 is a call to action – I can also feel myself growing less flexible. I’ve been in touch with a couple of gyms and will hopefully start training in July.
My writing has been slow – the regular story emails continue, but I still struggle to work out what to do next. I want to work on a larger project than regular, unrelated microfictions, but I’m finding it hard to make progress with anything.
Great scenery, terrible idea
My trip to Wales was my longest holiday in my current job. It was difficult to go away in the late stages of a project, but I think it was important to disengage. I returned feeling fresher, and clear-headed. Before I left, a few people mentioned that I had seemed stressed, so that is something to dial down a little.
This month’s dystopian book club choice was a terrible 600-pager, an apocalyptic military fiction that dragged itself through much of the month. The Haves and Have-Yachts was a compilation of New Yorker articles, none of the others being as good as the excellent title piece. As research, I re-read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I also read Wimmy Road Boys, inspired by a Guardian article on the writer. I had to look up a lot of the slang, but it’s a great book, and an exploration of a culture I had little knowledge of.
Only half-a-dozen films this month. I saw Masters of the Universe with Rosy, and it was predictably terrible, even in IMAX. I only caught a few movies in Wales – rewatches of Sinners and Inception, and I finally saw Titanic. I watched all ten episodes of Widow’s Bay across three days at the end of my time off, and that was excellent. I’m also excited about the Legally Blonde prequel, which places Elle as a fish-out-of-water in grunge-era Seattle. It’s an interesting inversion to see the grunge kids as the bad guys and a ‘plastic’ as the hero.
The shortness of this entry belies a wonderful month, spending time in good company, meeting so many inspirational people. Hopefully we will all get a chance to spend time together again in the near future.
