Walk but not the Talk

I’m still mulling over the next chapter in my art I’d like to hang on my walls list. While I do that, I think a Friday round up is in order.

I’ve been back at the boat for nearly two weeks now. It has been really good to unpack my bags properly after a summer spent pelting up and down the M11. I have begun to pick up the threads of my life again after a lot of stop start, will they, won’t they join the dance stuff. I’m back in Leicester next week for a couple of days, but for the lovely job of celebrating my friend

Matt Glover

at the launch of his recipe book. This is more than acceptable. This is hotly anticipated.

In boat space I have been gently reintroducing my walks. They trailed off as the summer progressed. I did a lot of travelling but most of it driving or picking through my own psyche in the manner of a bomb disposal unit crossing no man’s land. Both of these things were so tiring that the thought of going for a walk as well just made me cry, even though I knew it was good for me.

This is one of the things that I get really worked up about when I see those killer instagram posts where an immaculately made up woman stares breathily into the camera and tells you all the things that she has done to live her perfect life. It’s so easy, you could do it too, if only you cut out complex carbs, get up at 3.00 a.m. to meditate, lift weights to stop yourself getting spiral fractures from reaching for a jar of spirulina dust, etc. How do people like this have the discipline to do all these things, most of which I find unspeakably dull, day after day? Even when my life is going well I find it nigh on impossible. When I’ve spent all day in my parent’s garage attempting to sort mountains of antique glass into digestible foothills I don’t need to feel terrible that eating a Twirl will ruin me as a woman or guilty that I’m not setting out with a head torch at 10.00 p.m. to fit in my daily steps.

Unfortunately, one of those breathily perfect women lives in my head. She’s a really dewy skinned brain monkey, chat chat chatting on about the woman I could be if I just made the effort to be someone else entirely. When I got back to the boat and unpacked my pants, she went into overdrive, wittering on about how if I just started walking twelve miles a day now and existed on a diet of seasonal stone fruit and despair, I could whip myself into shape again by Christmas.

Her demands are outrageous, but sadly within the realms of the possible, which means that her grip is tenacious. I have given up listening to the brain monkey that shrieks about perky breasts. That ship has sailed, and sunk to the bottom of the harbour under the weight of my hefty, non perky breasts. There are other women in my head who have packed up and moved out, under no illusion that whatever it was they were keen for me to do and be has become so farcical that there’s no longer any point trying. i.e. being Kate Moss, being a woman who knows about bit coin, being a woman who cares about brassicas etc.

For the first couple of days, the breathy woman was so loud I was paralysed. I sat about feeling horrendously guilty about everything I wasn’t doing and immediately downgraded everything that I had done or was doing. It started with my health, general demeanour, posture and weight and spiralled to the point where I wondered why someone hadn’t arrested me and tried me for Nazi war crimes. Ah, said the breathy monkey lady, of course you wouldn’t have been tried for war crimes if you weren’t so fat. Plunge, plunge, plunge into despair I went.

What I have learned over many years of this particular battle is simple, but very, very hard to implement. I have learned not to fight. The more energy I give this kind of thing, the more insistent it becomes. Instead I need to starve it of oxygen. I just let her babble on until she and I are worn out. Then I creep out the room while she’s having a nap.

I crept out of the room and down to Canning Town, where I met my friend Zak for a drink and a catch up. On the way home I thought about taking a longer, more exercisey route. I didn’t. The next day I crept off to the library. Since then I have done gentle walks down to the river, to the Greenwich footbridge, to the farm and to the park. I haven’t checked my steps. I haven’t set any fitness goals. When I was tired I sat down. When I’d had enough I came home. When my monkey started to chatter I listened to a podcast or an audio book. I am gradually waking up that part of me that takes joy in a walk because of where I am, not who I am or who I might be in future.

It doesn’t always work. Some days are better than others for all kinds of reasons. Yesterday I decided to take my sketch book to my local park. When I got there it was boiling hot, all the shade was already taken by people soaking up the last of the summer and the plants that I had wanted to draw were dead. I hopped on a bus and went to a different park, where things were less dead but it was heaving with people because school was finished and that park had a boating lake and a good playground and an ice cream van. It was not the restful idyll that I had imagined.

On my way home, the bus broke down and kicked us out in a complex tangle of roadworks which meant that a huge stretch of the road was closed off. By the time I had walked to where I could have caught another bus, I was nearly home anyway. I did a lot more steps than I would have liked and produced no drawings whatsoever. I arrived back at the boat, beet red, slithery with sweat and feeling no joy whatsoever about anything. The breathy brain monkey lady was delighted with me. I told her to fuck off and suddenly felt a lot better.