Tag: 52and40
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52and40/39 Method in the Madness
I’ve been unitasking. I like that this sounds like unicycling but actually involves zero circus fuckery. Unitasking’s simply doing one thing at a time. I can multitask but I make mistakes, get stressed and then there’s frustration about rushing or being a bitch to myself or some poor bystander along the way. So, no more…
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52and40/37 White Noise
I love the odd day in Glasgow. As familiarity grows, I’m beginning to link the city up with maps, memories, family folklore and reference points in the past, present and future. I like the break from Edinburgh’s tourism too, when I’m off west. Interactions with people and the pavement feel markedly more real and more easily…
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52and40/36 ‘Tis The Season
My mental health’s gone off kilter recently. As a health-conscious veteran of PMDD, postnatal and antenatal depressions, I know when my neurochemistry’s recalibrated in an unhelpful direction. I’m lucky SSRIs work well for me and I feel positive, mainly, about medical interventions. I like my life in full, balanced colour. So, while the palette reloads, I’m taking…
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52and40/35 The Four Temperaments
Have you heard of The Four Temperaments? I hadn’t, till a tree in Dreghorn Woods put me onto them. Apparently they’re the oldest understanding of personality categorising, split into four types, that we humans wrote down and kinda understood. Throughout history we seem to have dealt less with nuance than we’re open to now. I took…
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52and40/33 Feel The Burn
How is it October? And 2017? And, bloody hell, I’m 41. Anxiety’s a tide inside my flesh. What if I don’t have time to do it all, whatever else ‘it’ might be? Then, eight hours later, zen. My five nights on Raasay were wonderful. Even the fall into a wide burn as if it were…
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52and40/31 On The Fringes
I loved this year’s Edinburgh Festival & Fringe. It felt like mine as well as everyone else’s, for the first time. My annual bout of imposter syndrome somehow didn’t arrive. As my kids start to think of futures outside the city I’ve grown in mindfulness of what we have while we’re here because, as an…
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52and40/30 True Colours
I’ve found so much in the Pentlands since moving to Edinburgh. Beauty and calm, mostly. Birds. Space to walk and run out problems, too. Places to be with the kids, to eat and talk. The city’s wonderful but if I didn’t have something opposite to frame it, I’d appreciate it much less. One 2016 day…
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52and40/29 Realignment
I’ve been waking for weeks feeling badly misaligned. We had builders in, next door have builders in, two houses adjacent had builders in. With all the banging, shouting and stress there’s been little chance for creativity; each time I transported to inner space interruptions brought me clattering back. In parallel, feeling predated a notch too…
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52and40/28 Ties That Bind
Months ago, husband and I scoured our west coast map for unseen places, zoning in on Glenelg. We went last week, exhilarated by the drive over The Ratagan Pass which had us whooping, awe-filled and delighted about the backseat being uncharacteristically empty so nobody was chucking up. It was a flying visit, but a great…
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52and40/27 Altered Images
I’ve been working on a new project called The Grantidote. Last week it took me west, to where I come from. The Grantidote’s centering women, pausing to understand how a woman’s wholeness is made up of fragments big and small, some chosen, others delivered by circumstance. The Grantidote’s about acknowledging the marks women leave on…
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