Lambs
As we tucked into our delicious Easter Sunday lunch of roast lamb and vegetables, some of the sheep outside were in the process of giving birth. As we munched away, the farmer and his family were riding around on their quad bike, jumping off to inspect the newborn lambs and then chuck them into the trailer with their mother to take them down to the nursery field. When the farmer had gone we saw a mother sheep aggressively headbutting a newborn lamb away from her: once, twice, three times. It was distressing to watch until we realised that she was doing the right thing. It wasn’t her lamb and she wanted to preserve her milk for her own young ones. The lamb’s real mother soon turned up and the crisis was over.

Geese
On the way into town I had to stop the car because the neighbour’s geese had escaped onto the road and were too startled to get out of my way. I got out and herded them back into their garden. Once in town we all went for a walk along the beach. Overhead a flock of wild geese flew north, towards Scandinavia. I thought of H, who is on a literal wild goose chase these days as he writes a book about the journeys of Arctic Geese. Around five minutes after we’d seen the flock, a lone goose could be seen and heard overhead. He was honking madly and flapping his wings for all he was worth. Presumably he’d been left behind and was now trying to catch up with the group. I hope he made it.

Dogs
We went to Findhorn to visit P’s friend, S. S has a lovely dog called Cracker, who has something wrong with the soft tissue that lines his throat. He can’t swallow properly, although he is otherwise in good health. When we arrived S was exasperated with Cracker, who had run off that morning and eaten something he shouldn’t. Because he can’t swallow properly, eating becomes dangerous and he risks ingesting food into his lungs. He’s had pneumonia many times in the last 18 months and S has had to give up his job to care for him. S barely sleeps at night as the dog needs medicine every four hours! P and I were talking about it afterwards, saying how we couldn’t sacrifice so much for an animal. And yet, Cracker had all the personality of a human friend. S says he has thought of having him put down, but when he looks into Cracker’s eyes he sees a lust for life that can’t be denied. I told P about my first dog, Tessa, and how she’d eaten a poisoned rabbit while I was walking her and then taken 17 hours to die. The vet stayed up all night trying to save her but the strychnine was too strong. When I woke up the next morning my grandfather broke the news and I cried in his arms. Something closed over in my heart that day, and though I’ve loved other animals very much, I don’t think I could care for one in the same way again. Humans are more important than animals, I always say, but I admire S all the same. He calls Cracker his guru, and I think I understand why.

Flies
On the way up we stopped at a service station in Perthshire and a fruit fly snuck into the cabin of our van and hid there until I noticed it in the Highlands. I joked that we were taking it on holiday and it would struggle to fly the 100 miles back to its home. I assumed it would fly out of the van while we were unloading it, but three days later on the return journey I noticed it again, still alive. We were pretty near the service station where it had joined us, so I wound down the window and let it out. I wonder if it made it ‘home’?

I don’t know much about Alexander himself, or the history of his technique, but I have had various people singing its praises to me over the years. Actors use it to improve their bearing, sportspeople use it to improve their alignment, and it is particularly recommended for sedentary office workers like me, for whom the default sitting position is slumped.

My Alexander teacher is in her fifties but looks at least a decade younger. She moves with a lovely ease and grace, which is perhaps the best advertisement for the service she offers. She starts out by showing you a little model of the human skeleton and then asking you to guess things like where the centre of your body is and where the spine meets the skull. I got both of these wrong, and she explained that it is useful to correct these misunderstandings in order to create a more accurate mental map of our body to help us move it more efficiently. For example, if you envisage the middle of your body being around your belly button, you are more likely to bend forward from your lower back, rather than from your hips where your natural centre is.

After this she began to teach me things I thought I had mastered as a toddler, like how to get into and out of a chair, how to bend down and how to sit straight so that the postural muscles in the centre of the body do the work, rather than the more easily tired shoulder muscles.

Several months down the line and I am still struggling with some of this. Sitting upright without tensing the shoulders is hard for me, as is standing without bracing the backs of my knees (several decades of standing like this have caused all sorts of other misalignments to creep in, which I am slowly and steadily trying to correct).

Sometimes I wonder why I’m doing this. I still have back pain when I sit at the computer for any length of time, and have realised that I have quite limited movement in one arm compared to the other, which makes it feel like I have gone backwards, rather than forwards. But the benefits of studying Alexander technique are myriad. Firstly, it feels empowering to have a better understanding of my body and how it works. Secondly, small changes can make a big difference. For instance, when I have to bend down to pick something up I now squat like a frog rather than bending from the back. Although the result looks decidedly inelegant, the reduction in lower back strain is marked. I can also feel a new fluidity when I stand in one place or get into and out of a chair, which actually gives movement some of the simple pleasure it provided as a child.

Long-term I have no doubt that the work I put in now will reap benefits. I remember meeting a friend of my grandmother’s some years ago – a little old lady at least a foot shorter than me and with a pronounced stoop. She looked at me and said wistfully, ‘I remember when I was as tall as you.’ ‘What happened,’ I asked, horrified. ‘I didn’t take care of myself,’ she replied.

Amongst other things she talks about some of the misconceptions surrounding children and sex, and gives some tips on how to reduce the embarrassment factor when talking to children about sex and sexuality.

Podcast 2.1 Sex Education in UK Schools

Podcast 2.2 When and how to talk to kids about sex

Podcast 2.3 Why talk to your child about sex

Podcast 2.4 STIs on the rise in the UK

Podcast 2.5 Helping your child make good decisions about sex

If you have any comments on this podcast or would like to hear any more, please let me know.

Why is any of this tedious detail worth blogging about? It isn’t, in and of itself. But, after working for a company that didn’t pay my salary for several months in 2008, and the unpleasant money problems that ensued, it feels like a substantial victory to be back on my feet and making progress financially. Although I’ve never been well off it wasn’t until I encountered that unscrupulous employer that I understood the very strong link between financial stability and mental health/happiness. Unless you are this girl, I imagine that having no money and no certainty about your income can only be a stressful and depressing experience.

That said, I did live in a similar way to Katherine Hibbert last winter. After I walked away from the job that didn’t pay I had no choice but to move out of my lovely two-bedroomed flat in the Hampshire countryside and take the cheapest room I could find in a tiny underheated flat in Edinburgh, living with a friend who puts Scrooge to shame with his miserly ways. I was returning to Edinburgh with my tail well and truly between my legs, having left barely five months earlier to start a new life with a well paid job, lovely flat and excellent prospects. I was angry, skint and embarrassed, and can’t have been much fun to be around.

However, once I’d accepted my situation and managed to claw back the freelance clients I’d said goodbye to at the beginning of the year, I began to take some interest in my new straitened circumstances. My flatmate had been what is known as a ‘freegan’ for some years, and I enthusiastically adopted this practice as a means of eliminating my food bills. A freegan is someone who eats food discarded by others, usually large supermarket chains. We would head out around 2 or 3 in the morning and drive out to one of the Marks and Spencers’ stores at the edge of the city. After checking for security guards we’d park the car and head over to the bins. Often these were filled with rotting bread, flowers and other inedible items, but there would generally be one that was filled with food that had either gone past its sell by date that day or was still just in date. Once we’d hit the jackpot, flatmate would climb into the bin, root about and chuck selected items at me to put into a sack. We’d take away as much as we could safely store in our fridge and freezer and then drive home, where we’d unload our goods and spend several hours sorting, cleaning, storing and then eating a celebratory meal. (M & S are good enough not to lock their bins, but they have a bizarre habit of spraying blue dye over the packets of food, which meant we often arrived home ‘blue handed’).

I felt a slight embarrassment about what I was doing, mostly because I knew my mother wouldn’t like it. But the savings I made, the improved quality of the food I ate, plus the general fun I had doing it, completely changed my attitude to scavenging, and made me see some advantages to living on a reduced income. Additionally, instead of living on my own in a flat that was much too big for me I was staying with lots of people – young, fun, foreign, enjoying their lives and making do with not much except each other. Although I was miserable and bitter about my experience I had companionship and laughter in my life. I stayed in that flat for five months, by which time I’d rebuilt my business and accumulated enough savings to allow me to take time off work to study for my exams and have a vacation for the first time in six years. I found the thin walls, constant noise and appalling levels of cleanliness in the flat quite trying, but being surrounded by young happy people who weren’t constantly moaning about money, work and mortgages was a better cure for me than a handout from a rich relative would have been.

I enjoy making money and buying things with the money I have earned, but I suspect I only do so because I am painfully aware of what it takes to make any money in the first place. Life shouldn’t be unbearably hard but nor should it be too easy. If I hadn’t nearly lost everything two years ago the current healthy state of my finances wouldn’t be giving me so much joy now.

I didn’t know these existed until today (indeed, I knew almost nothing about my grandfather, who died before I was born, until very recently). I’m quite excited by them, and about the possibility of discovering more about my grandfather.

This all happened back in August, and I hadn’t been inside her house since then – had been avoiding it, in fact. My relationship with my grandmother is not good. I don’t much like her and judging by comments made at our last meeting the feeling is mutual. I try not to take it personally. She doesn’t seem to like anyone. In fact, famously, she once told my father that she much preferred things to people. Oh yes, the acquisition of things has played a big part in my grandmother’s life – antique furniture especially. As a child I used to earn extra pocket money by visiting her fortnightly and polishing the many old wooden chairs, desks, tables and chests of drawers in her house, a task that could take several hours depending on how diligent I was feeling. Although the pieces in her house were quite beautiful I took very great care never to covet any of them. Early on I took an intense dislike to what I saw as her inhumane placing of things above people. God knows as I’ve gotten older I’ve come to understand it better. People are infinitely unreliable. They let one down most awfully. Pieces of furniture, on the other hand, well they don’t turn their back on you in a crisis. All they require is an occasional coat of beeswax, and a good rub down. The best pieces even increase in value as time goes on. Who wouldn’t prefer a beautiful old bureau over a gambling husband, an over-talkative servant, an unmarried granddaughter with a bizarre career in some new-fangled technology you can’t understand so feel compelled to reject?

If I sound a touch bitter it is because I am. And so it was in a highly disgruntled mood that I traipsed along to her house this afternoon. When we unlocked the door and went in I found a place both oddly familiar and quite unrecognisable. The rooms had once been worthy of a spread in an upmarket interiors magazine, but the flood had ruined one end of the house and the rest was in considerable disarray. Damaged furniture had been removed, other pieces distributed to various family members and named beneficiaries. Some had gone with Grandmother to her new home. Amusingly, her collection of ornamental owls, which I have never wanted but which she has nevertheless seen fit to bequeath to me, were all arranged on a counter top, mocking me with their wise old eyes. There are forty or fifty of the darned things and I have no idea what to do with them.

My initial response was to reject the lot of it. I am feeling especially angry with my grandmother at the moment, and everything she has touched seems imbued with her particularly potent form of negativity (I have one of her teapots at home in London – again unasked for – and just the sight of it can bring a crease to my brow.) However, it doesn’t do to allow mere objects to assume such power. Better to treat them casually, even mockingly, to drive some of the evil away. In the end I settled on some lamps that would actually have some use for me, and an old table that is the only thing I know of that relates to my grandfather in any way (she relegated it to the greenhouse rather than keep it indoors).

In what was her bedroom, we found some traces of the old interior walls of the cottage, as it was when my brother and I lived there as little children. My grandmother’s presence in that house was so strong that I often forgot that I had spent the first eleven years of my life playing happily under its heather thatch. We stood there, reminding ourselves of where the old rayburn used to be, how the door to the bathroom was positioned, where my old hand painting of a monster had adorned the wall for years. It felt like an exorcism for me – to reclaim this house where I had spent many happy years from the memory of my grandmother and the pretty but miserable museum she made of it.

In the time she lived there whole trees grew up and cast a shadow over the house. My dad has cut many of them down now, and the place feels like it can breathe again. I shall feel happier still when someone new moves in there, hopefully filling the place with cheap and cheerful IKEA sofas and kitchen units, and chairs they have opportunistically plucked out of a skip.

Meanwhile I shall do my best not to be troubled by my lamps and teapot, and to think of something amusing and inappropriate to do with my collection of ornamental owls.