Word Art Competition with Arvon Foundation.

I've just submitted a piece of work to the Arvon Foundation for their Word Art Competition and feel rather pleased with myself.

I wrote a short piece trying to capture how it feels to run early in the morning and painted the route that I often run in a slightly abstract way, trying to capture the colours I feel after I have been for a run rather than something representational.

This is a new departure for me, I have often written words and thoughts but keep a lot of my creative writing secret.  So to enter a competition with a company that I, dare I admit it, desperately want to go on one of their courses, feels rather exciting.

So a big thank you to my sister Sylvia for pointing this competition out to me.

Running at 6am

This is a second version I have made, the first was a little book.  However, the little book has had a massive fit of shyness and has refused to come out and have its photo taken.   I cannot coax it out of its hiding place or in fact find its hiding place...

GPS Tracking

I've been playing with GPS Tracking by downloading Sports Tracker to my phone.  Initially this was to see hard data on the progress I've been making, but then I started to play with it...

At first just zig zagging across the field to see how sensitive it was to smaller movements, which came up with this:-

I like the effect of leaving an ethereal trace of where I have been on the landscape, more than just footprints, but an essence of myself.

I then took some string up the local playground and gained some very bizarre looks from teenagers as I wrote on the football pitch, and then walked it.  I also tried to map my friends living willow labyrinth, but that just ended up looking as though a toddler had been scribbling on the trees.  I'm a bit clearer on how precise the GPS tracker can be.

At this point my own kids pretended not to know me...

Julia

Julia sat and took another bite out of her limp lunch, the token piece of healthy rocket hanging over the edge of the crust, and balanced the book alongside her plate. The book was easy to read, easy to follow and made it all sound so easy. It had sat for a couple of weeks on the bookshelf, sandwiched between Susan Jeffers and Julia Cameron, hidden where she knew no one would bother to look at it.

It felt like a she was about to embark on climbing Everest without an oxygen mask. And in trainers. She would frequently daydream back to the days, when cycling 8 miles home from the office had been a downhill free pedal, or further back when the stand on your pedals, thigh muscle torture of hills had made her burn with pleasure or running several kilometres had been a meditation on repetition. Or the pleasure of feeling every muscle in her body ache from 50 lengths of the pool had made her collapse into bed with physical exhaustion.

Childbirth, alcohol, prozac, closely followed by divorce and a life on benefits were displayed on her hips for all to see and judge her by. Unable to reach those peaks of physical activity, Julia sought solace where she could find it. Between the pages of a vast library of subjects, art, philosophy, identity, personal development, cookery, paganism, christianity and exercise. Bloody exercise that over the years had become her nemesis. From her sofa she could read about all the subjects and interests she loved. However, this did not transform into actually doing and the longer she digested these tomes on life, the less she actually lived it.

She had however, lived the life of the dieter, from slimming clubs to amphetamines to bulimia and regrettably none of these winning the competition for her sylph like form and her head remained crownless, leaving her stand on the nhs spotlight of 'obese, increased likelihood of heart disease'.

She didn't want the narrative of her life to read like a Hattie Jacques biography, with descriptions of voluptuousness and larger the lifeness. She wanted a Trinity or Lisbeth Salander description and the realisation that reading these descriptions was not going to metamorphosise these lean muscular figures off the page and into her reality.

Reading and consuming would not make her reality that different. She had to take her trainers firmly by the laces and assert some authority over them. She had to live.

The book (still reading between the lines) insisted she went for an actual walk. Encouraging words of inspiration assured her it was the place to start, the dog raised its eyes in hopeful agreement.

'I suppose,' Julia mused at the depressed dog, 'a good place to start would be with getting dressed...'