while you're ahead…

I woke up early keen not to waste a minute of precious time.

I jumped up, opened the curtains – yeay, sunny – and promptly jumped into bed to finish the last 20 pages of the book I was reading. (The Appointment by Katharina Volkmear – incredibly written btw). Job done, let’s get on with the day…

The hotel I’m staying has bikes for rent so today I decided I was going to cycle around and get a feel for the city, well the harbour part anyway. I headed first thing for Lille Bakery, a quick 5Km away in the area called Refshaleveøen, a former island now annexed to another, and former industrial area now home to food stalls, upmarket restaurants and art galleries.

Along the way there were so many gorgeous sights and for a while I kept stopping… but it was getting ridiculous so after a while I simply looked around trying not to crash the bike into anyone. I might have got beeped a few times… maybe.

Such diverse images all in a space of a few miles.

And then I got to Lille Bakery… the coolest place:

I ordered a coffee, a chocolate cookie (omg) and scrambled eggs on rye bread with tarragon. Delicious.

After this very filling brunch I cycled around the corner to the Copenhagen Contemporary, house in a ginormous hangar type building.

The main hall had an installation by the English artist David Shrigley called ‘Don’t touch the worms’, playful and well… all about worms!.

While in the next hall there was a video installation by the Danish artist Christian Falsnaes titled ‘Look at me’… quite intense and unsettling.

I strolled around the place for quite a while, it was very quiet and it felt safe, away from people and potential germs… you know how it is these days…

The wind had picked up when I got back on the bike and I realised that walking muscles are totally different from cycling muscles… I must have been the slowest cyclist in the whole of Copenhagen. Everyone was faster than me, but it didn’t matter, I struggled on, the giant Amager Bakke (a combined heat and power waste-to-energy plant and sports facility – a ski slope on top of an incinerator… genius) kept a watch over me.

I wanted to see the new Opera House building… but it was closed so I took a photo from much too close an angle and snailed on..

I had a delicious fresh juice on the way in a cute place near Christiania (Freetown Christiania, is an intentional community and commune of about 850 to 1,000 residents according to Wikipedia), called Sweet Retreat

My next stop was going to be the little mermaid… but frankly… I’ve seen it already and I don’t think it would have changed much since 1989 (certainly less than I did) so changed the plan and headed to Rosenborg Castle instead. Set in a beautiful park…

It is also incredibly well preserved and sumptuous and so ornate and old and detailed that was just the perfect antidote to the ‘worms’ of the morning. A good balancing act!

Let all agree that Scandinavian minimalism wasn’t a thing back then…

After, because I’m fundamentally a geeky tourist I wanted to see the inside of the new library, which I had passed from the opposite side of the water first thing in the morning.

I love libraries.

It then started to POUR right as I got back on the bike so I hid in BLOX but I didn’t have the time to visit it properly. It looks like an amazing place for kids with great interactive spaces where they can run free.

And then I tootled back, I had cycled over 20Km and I was a little pooped.

Excellent day though.

I believe there are two ways of experiencing a holiday: exhaling and inhaling. Let me explain, if you step on a beach, or look at a new vista, or simply walk on a trail and feel yourself breathing out, you let go of the worries of the world, you drop your daily burdens and feel yourself re-born… you’re an ‘exhaler’. Me? Most of the time I’m totally the opposite… I need to go somewhere new and inhale… new sights, new smells, new skies, buildings, art. Holidays for me are a refill, a total re-charge ready for ‘real life’ whatever that is. (I hate that expression, frankly holidays/travels are more real that the everyday AND YES I know we should be always presents in every moment, but we’re not talking about that now).

So… I’m in Copenhagen, and breath in… I’m in Copenhagen on my own for a week of sightseeing and new horizons, deep breath in….

I arrived yesterday afternoon after a slightly strange flight, wearing a mask, social distanced queues and quiet airports both sides, but the sun was shining and after 163 days of total or partial lockdown it was wonderful to be OUT OUT.

And breath in.

A quick taxi ride from the airport through smooth and quiet streets and I arrived at my hotel in no time. It’s wonderful, and I’ll show you at the end of the trip where I’m staying. I dumped the bags and went out for a stroll, I wanted to get an idea how close things are so I grabbed one of maps and off I went…

I took the opportunity to ‘visit’ the Royal Copenhagen Radisson Hotel which was designed in 1960 by Arne Jacobsen – the first ‘designer’ hotel – and still on of the tallest buildings in the city. The lobby was refurbed in 2018, but of course they kept the beautiful style and the famous ‘Egg’ chairs Jacobsen designed for this hotel and which have become a design classic.

I honestly felt like I was on a Mad Men set!

I then strolled back via the City Hall, built 1892-1905 in the National Romantic Style. It is an open building so I might go back another day and have a mooch inside.

Bed early for me after an amazing dinner. Big plans for tomorrow, stay tuned.

Day 132.

First walk with young Murphy and ancient Lilli; so many ways it could have gone terribly wrong… but didn’t.

He’s ready to go in this picture, he can see the ‘harness that promises good things’ in my hands and is wondering why am I taking pictures AGAIN!.. instead of getting on with it…

“C’mon, already”

Our walk took us in a big(ish) loop around the Sherborne Estate and it was an easy to follow and varied route. Only 2.5 miles, but just enough for either dog, each one at opposite ends of their walking life.

There is something so enjoyable about walking with a dog… maybe it’s their enthusiasm, their absolute joy in random running up and down… I don’t know, but it almost gives more of a purpose to the walk, just in case you need one and ‘walking’ per se it’s not enough.

I think it also helps in making you look around more and not get too lost in your thoughts that you stop noticing all the beauty you’re surrounded by. They’re grounding.

… and then they crash when you get back home allowing you to do the same!

(Perhaps not on the floor…)

As a treat here is a lovely poem about a dog called Luke (by Mary Oliver)

LUKE

I had a dog
  who loved flowers.
    Briskly she went
        through the fields, 

yet paused
  for the honeysuckle
    or the rose,
        her dark head 

and her wet nose
  touching
    the face
         of every one 

with its petals
  of silk,
    with its fragrance
         rising 

into the air
  where the bees,
    their bodies
        heavy with pollen, 

hovered—
  and easily
     she adored
        every blossom, 

not in the serious,
  careful way
    that we choose
        this blossom or that blossom— 

the way we praise or don’t praise—
  the way we love
     or don’t love—
        but the way 

we long to be—
  that happy
    in the heaven of earth—
        that wild, that loving.

There’s a new little girl in our square, which is lovely and it made me think how your own children are all grown up and hairy now and how cute they were when in their little onesies, gurgling away in their prams… their chubby feet and fluffy hair…. Time has a funny way to make you forget the insane tiredness, the constant sour milk smell on your clothes, the constant nappy changing… which is just as well or humanity would have gone extinct eons ago.

Her name is Isabella Rose, which is so lovely it’s almost too much and it definitively deserved a gentle, pink quilt, don’t you think?

I should have taken a photo of the whole thing, but I had no spare help and was too keen to hand it over to her new owner… but you get the idea… And it was so nice to do something girlie for a change! The square are 6″ and the whole quilt is 5 squares by 7 squares. I find it’s a good size to use as a floor mat, or a lap quilt, or to wrap a child up on the sofa when they’re older.

(Also, incidentally, why do I keep using fabric from the stash and the stash never diminishes? and no I haven’t bought any fabric either. So weird)

The Sunday walk is becoming quite the routine around here; it’s usually just the husband and I but one lives in hope that one of the offspring might feel ‘generous’ and grace us with their presence sooner or later. Of course it hasn’t happened yet, and to be frank, living with grown up(ish) teenagers is like running a guest house with added laundry facilities. My only consolation is karma… if it exists they will have children just like them and then we’ll talk! (how I will laugh inside…)

Anyway, this week’s talk had a touch of literature and history to spice it up: the walk began in the village of Adlestrop, near Stow on the Wold; the poet Edward Thomas wrote a beautiful poem after his train stopped at its station on a hot summer’s day:

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
No one left and no one came
On the bare platform. What I saw
Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,
And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,
No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

… through field…

… under big skies and big spaces…

and flowers…

Here the husband was trying to decide if to eat the peas looking things in the field. He did. Whatever they were, they weren’t poisonous…

We then arrived at Chastleton House, a gorgeous National Trust property, well worth a visit, when it re-opens. A lot of history and full of the original furnitures and objects.

Last time we were here the local Scout group were serving delicious home made cakes in the church grounds.

Then back to open views…

We also passed an Iron Age circular barrow (not much to photograph, but interesting) dated between 400 and 800 BC.

And then we were back to Adlestrop, which is a gorgeous village by the way… shame the post-office/shop was closed, could have done with an ice cream…

And then back home for Sunday roast…

Day 126.

The gyms are opening. Don’t feel confident it’s the right thing to do… new cases are still going up so I’m staying put. With a crazy dog and my books (and a pile or ironing… but we don’t talk about such matters here), and a weekly walk with the husband exploring the local countryside.

And talking of books and walking: The Old Ways is a wonderful book.

I first heard of Robert Macfarlane when, a few months ago we watched the movie ‘Mountains‘ (more a documentary/love story of mountains), stunning words and photography and Willem Dafoe is the voiceover, what’s not to like? Anyway, if you love mountains like me check it out, it’s such a lyrical ode to the mountains that it’ll make you want to pack your boots and go. (Blasted Covid19… Mr M and I were going to spend the long weekend of my birthday on the Dolomites – the best mountains in world, don’t even try to argue with me on this one -.. but obviously it wasn’t possible).

I’m digressing, I knew I wanted to read more of his words and given it was a little painful to read about mountains when unable to go, I chose his 2012 book The Old Ways because it’s all about walking mostly in England, and THAT we can most certainly do (and have been doing).

The book it’s all about paths, what they mean, how they’ve been made. It’s about the connection between walking/the land and people.

Paths are the habits of a landscape. They are acts of consensual making. It’s hard to create a footpath on your own…Paths connect. This is their first duty and their chief reason for being. They relate places in a literal sense, and by extension they relate people

I love how it references the poet Edward Thomas as his inspiration because that it exactly how I re-discovered walking, through Thomas’s writing and poems after studying his work last year at College and discovering that he lived around here for a while (near Robert Frost, another one of my favourite poets). Thomas walked everywhere, he walked to get out of himself and his depression but also to find himself, he wrote beautifully about nature and what it meant for him. I love how Macfarlane writes that paths not only connect places to each other, but people too, and the past to the present.

I find it fascinating and must have underlined hundreds of quotes (and checked the dictionary hundreds of time… and there’s me thinking I’ve mastered the English language… ahem)..

I am always intrigued by how people perceived the sense of the place they inhabit, why some people ‘feel at home’, and more and more by how people interact with the place they live in. I’ve discovered so much about my town, and my area since being unable travel to far away places, since I’ve been forced to slow down. Walking has done that so if you do like the slow, one step at a time, experience you would like this book.

I’ve also realised how utterly ignorant I am about trees and flowers and birds and clouds… you name it… (I’m like ‘oh what a nice… pink flower! what a big tree… sigh…) .. and I bought myself a couple of books on trees and wild flowers!

Thought, like memory, inhabits external things as much as the inner regions of the human brain. When the physical correspondents of thought disappear, then thought, or its possibility, is also lost. When woods and trees are destroyed — incidentally, deliberately — imagination and memory go with them. W.H. Auden knew this. ‘A culture,’ he wrote warningly in 1953, ‘is no better than its woods.

And it really made me want to go walking more and more, further and further.

Another Sunday, another walk.

I can’t wait to be able bring Murphy on our walks… I know he’ll love them and will be a joy to watch.

This time we started at the Village of Brimpsfield. The husband and I.

… where a castle used to be, but is no more… so we played with the water in a trough…

… and climbed many stiles… and looked up and admired the empty countryside…

… instead there were beautiful trees, and ponds, and easy paths…

… and flowers and gates to magical kingdoms…

… and big skies to breath in…