Indoors, outdoors

 

 

Indoors: In order to remember to do the exercises for my knees and some yoga and meditation every day, I now leave a pillow on the yoga mat as a visual reminder. I can see it from the main room (I leave all the doors open most of the time and my house is very small), so there is no way around it. I also need it for some of the exercises. When I am finished I put the pillow back on the spare bed. So far this works. Once I get used to the sight of the pillow on the floor, this may change.

I am rereading To the Lighthouse (while standing on one leg, for instance - this isn't just for the photo) and enjoyed the two introductions in this edition, particularly Eavan Boland's. "Perhaps most importantly, the lighthouse is at the service of the beautiful, insistent subjectivity which Mrs Ramsay turns on it in the first chapters, thereby including herself in the wider project of the book itself - diminishing a reality by uncovering a truth:..." (Woolf, Virginia: To the Lighthouse, Vintage, London 2004, p. xiv).

My early-morning-climbing-back-into-bed-for-half-an-hour* book is Toby Young's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, a successful book about failure, to paraphrase Nicholas Lezard. It is very entertaining with hilarious glimpses into the vainglorious world of Condé Nast and helpful in my endeavour to be more carefree and worry less - there is something cathartic about reading Young's cringe-inducing account of his time in New York. I suffer from excessive Fremdschaemen (being embarrassed on behalf of someone else), so I am probably way too involved when reading this, but it may give me a thicker skin for my own awkward moments.

Outdoors: More growing and an explosion of colours, and the trees are finally in bloom, too, if somewhat tentatively. I have been given the go-ahead to try running again, starting with 15 minutes, three of which to be walked, but due to a chesty cough I haven't done it yet. But I have been going for walks and getting lots of sun whenever it is out.

*a new habit