Above are pictures from our walk on Sunday morning. This was after I'd decided not to go shopping in Manchester but the day hadn't yet turned to ratshit! I felt pretty low but was holding it together and the lovely walk did make me feel happier even though the effects didn't last all day so it was the one positive from my weekend!
We went up to Surprise View and walked up to some rock formations and then round a decent circuit including Higger Tor (second picture) Carl Wark (an Iron Age hillfort) and Burbage Edge. What a glorious place that is - so many lovely paths, lots of variety from silver birch woods to heather and peat moorland; random carved millstones just littering the moorside; to the Iron Age hillfort which just blows your mind - It's still so obviously a fort but so remote and you can just clamber around it. In fact if Shelagh looks a tad guilty drinking out of that trough - so she should- it must have taken those Iron Age lads a long while to chisel out that trough and she just jumped straight in and drank the manky water without so much as a bow to history!!
Anyway, I must remember next time I'm feeling low to get out more and then keep up the good feeling I get from the beauty and the fresh air, not let it slip away. Looking back, it was a lovely morning so the day wasn't as wasted as I've been thinking it was.
Back to today - once again, a mixed report foodwise but the good thing is that I haven't wanted to eat as much. Although I've been picking at bits, it never threatened to get out of control and I resisted temptation more than I gave in. Overall, food has not been such a huge issue these last couple of days which is a massive relief to be honest. I don't mind eating weird stuff and strange combinations if I'm not thinking about food all the time and can put it in perspective.
Have been very busy though and with French in the evening couldn't do any exercise again this evening. Well, I COULD have done a home workout but had phone calls and then got engrossed in "Who do you think you are?" with Graham Norton.
That was a fascinating programme, for me especially this evening. If you didn't see it, he's a protestant from Southern Ireland which is fairly unusual and he said he never felt fully "Irish" so wanted to see how far back his family went in Ireland. On his dad's side he traced the family to a small hill village in Wicklow called Carnew which has a high proportion of protestants for Eire. Now I happen to know that village well as D's aunt and uncle (who is, btw, both a butcher and a bookmaker - I love the unuual combinations of businesses you get in small Irish villages!) and favourite cousins live there so that in itself was interesting.
I didn't know any of the protestant connections though so that is something I'll be asking about when I get over. It always intrigues me over there how homogenous the religion and community is compared to the UK. I suppose I see it as an outsider, an English prod married to an Irish Catholic, so I could understand what GN meant about feeling "set apart".
They then went to my husband's home town to talk about the 1798 uprising as there was an major battle there (on Vinegar Hill which you can see from their land) and a historical centre, so another connection. Eventually they traced his family back through the male line to 1672 to a tenant of the Earl of Fitzwilliam of the Wentworth Estate in, of all places, Rotherham, which is where I work! What a strange set of coincidences - these are not big or important places but I had a personal connection and knew well all 4 of the places they filmed that part of the show in. Weird eh? It really brought it to light for me and who'd have guessed that old GN is from South Yorkshire originally!!
Anyway, enough blathering - I've got early training tomorrow so at least I'll have done 2 sessions with the lovely Huw this week if nothing else. I'll have more time for exercising next week in Ireland and intend to do some nice long runs in the lanes round his parents and maybe even one along one of those gorgeous long beaches - can't wait.
5 comments:
I enjoyed that one with Graham Norton last night. It was quite poignant when he was coming to terms with his relatives fighting on a side that he said most people acknowledge to be the 'wrong' side.
It's quite funny because my Mum is a Glaswegian prod and while I've always been fairly proud of the Scottish roots, I'm less keen on the prod/loyalist aspects and tend to bury those. As a lefty, it would be much better to have ancestors who fought against oppression rather than accepted it. Still - this series in particular has really made me interested in looking into my family tree while my parents are still alive to answer my questions.
Sandra.
The walk looks LOVELY!!! Amazing what fresh air can do for the soul, eh?
And PS... how LEAN and AWESOME do you look in your sporty clothes below?!?!?!?! HOT!
Having just come back from a holiday where I had food constantly plied at me, here is my two cents (and when you consider the rapidly falling value of the American dollar, that's even less than usual): I tried to change my perceptions of a holiday, in that instead of looking at it as license to eat and drink whatever I only ate things I couldn't get anywhere else and wouldn't be seeing again anytime soon. That saved me eating a lot of crap I could have anytime, even if it was just anytime during the vacation (each meal I'd focus on what was unique to that meal/place, and what I really felt like having.) I also exercised nearly every day -- loads of time, so no excuse! -- and used some of the time to try exercise I hadn't had time for (I ripped out some home/no equipment workouts from fitness magazines and did those to mix it up a bit.)
Hope it's an amazing trip -- can't wait to see the pix of your Ireland wardrobe (and I confess, I'm a little envious of the soda bread...)
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