Teddy, our adorable little tabby and white cat, usually likes to hang out with me when I’m in my study. Currently she’s sleeping on the couch, but she usually starts off on my desk, often sitting, facing me, exactly where I need to put my sketchbook or keyboard, then she’ll spend some time draped around my shoulders. From there she’ll move to sit in the in-tray and observe me (or chew on the crackliest piece of cellophane she can find). I should really lift her off the desk or shoo her away but, even when I have lots to do, or work-in-progress that she’s about to dribble onto, her charms are pretty much impossible to resist!
Teddy sits in my in-tray and distracts me with her irresistible presence.“You wanted to use this desk? I don’t think so.”
Bonus illustration – My (equally irresistible) boyfriend’s response to the prompt:
My boyfriend, Peter’s response to the one-word prompt RESIST
Up until my mid-thirties I was painfully shy. I suffered badly from depression, and I had a very poor self-image. I was also woefully unfit. I would make the 15-minute walk to the station and be sweating by the time I got there, no matter how slowly I walked. I was ashamed of almost everything about myself, but mostly my body.
One day I decided to go for a run. At the time I was lucky enough to live just round the corner from Richmond Park, the largest of London’s eight Royal Parks, and a place that I grew to adore. It was the 15th of September 2009, a date so significant to me after the fact that I wrote it down and pinned it up so that I could track my progress.
On entering the park that day I turned left onto the path and started to jog. I chose the more sheltered of two paths in that direction so that no-one could see me, and I jogged for about twenty seconds before having to stop and lean against a tree while I gasped for air. I’m not even kidding: twenty seconds. I was in a right state. I got my breath back and set off again. I managed a few more metres and stopped again. I don’t remember how long that first excursion lasted for but it wasn’t long at all. I do remember the sense of achievement though (any runner will), and that is the thing that got me out of the house the next day to try again.
I ran most days, just a few minutes each time, and I used a very basic digital watch to time how long I could go without stopping. I would memorise my timings and log it all when I got home. I’d never heard of Garmins or Fitbits or GPS tracking.
One day I made it to the top of the first short, sharp hill on my route and instead of stopping to rest, I carried on running. What a revelation to find that I could get my breath back on the move! I ran in rain, snow, sleet, wind, blazing sunshine, and I loved it all. The wonderful thing about starting from a point of such inexperience and lack of fitness was that I improved in leaps and bounds. There’s nothing more motivating than seeing how far you’ve come and knowing that improvement is inevitable.
The most instant improvement was to my mental state. I was less depressed overall, and any time I felt particularly grim, a run would cheer me up and give me the buzz I needed to help fight the blues. I watched as my body changed too. Subtle changes and some barely visible, but I felt stronger and more capable, healthier and more in control of my body. This was not something to be loathed; this was a body that could carry me around the park, that could power me up hills, across fields and back home, a happy, sweaty mess.
Eventually I plucked up the courage to venture along to my local parkrun (a free, weekly, timed 5k run held in parks all over the country and internationally too), and began getting to know other runners of all levels of experience and fitness. I made some good friends and also volunteered regularly, learning lots about upcoming races, how to deal with injury, and how to motivate yourself when you just don’t feel like running. I entered a 5k race with a couple of friends and had the best time. Not bothered about setting any records, I just loved the challenge of improving my own times and I progressed to 10k races and started collecting my medals with pride.
Eventually I was ready for a half-marathon – an unthinkable endeavour a few years before – and I trained diligently for it. It really helped having a couple of friends who were into running too, and I didn’t mind that most of them were faster than me. I loved it, and entered another.
Looking back, I guess one of the very few things I miss about living in London is the flat terrain. I still run now I’m in the beautiful Cumbrian countryside, but, my goodness, the hills! Prior to moving I broke my ankle and wasn’t able to walk, let alone run for about three months. I lost a lot of fitness, and with it, a lot of confidence. Then we got to Cumbria and every run I made involved hills that I had to stop and walk up. No relaxing long, slow plods for me, so I’ve been running a lot less in the last year. I do run the mile and a half journey to work and back most days and each time the effect on my mood is instant. I do not look forward to my shift in the factory, but I’m ready to take on the day by the time I arrive there. Likewise, 8 hours on my feet in the noisy, hot environment is just a dim memory by the time I’ve jogged home.
A chance to catch my breath amid a spot of rural congestion.
Soon we are getting a car. This, I am hoping, will revitalise my running. I have no intention of driving to work, but I will be able to drive into Penrith to go to the parkrun there. I can drive to Talkin Tarn, a local beauty spot with a lake that I can plod around. I can enter races again, and set myself the challenge of getting somewhere close to my previous fitness. I’m writing this partly to make myself accountable. I want to feel the urge to run that I used too; the need to get out there and put in some miles. I have the most beautiful surroundings and quiet roads to traverse, and I have the time too, if I’m strict with myself. So please, if you’re reading this in a few months time, drop me a line and ask me how it’s going. Tell me about your own running journey, and if you’re local, maybe we can get out there together and run ourselves happy.
Illustration Friday is a website where people post their responses to a one-word brief each week. It provides an excellent motivation to draw, a way for other people to see my work, and, just as importantly, for me to discover other talented illustrators. I love it!
This week’s word is DELICIOUS. Here’s my interpretation:
One major reason we chose The Eden Valley as a place to live (aside, of course, from its stunning beauty, varied terrain and abundant wildlife) was that a couple of dear friends had made a similar move several years before. Every time I read their Facebook updates I would feel a strange mixture of joy, envy and optimism. What a life they were leading! From the same part of London as us to a tiny village at the foot of a fell, they seemed to have made the transition comfortably and were busy entering fully into local activities and the life of a small community, including allotment owning, a book club and running a monthly film night in the village hall.
Sharon, a novelist who works from home, would go for lunchtime walks up the fell and take beautiful photos of the views. Her husband, Adam, fulfilled his dream of owning a second-hand bookshop, the excellent Withnail Books in Penrith, and the satisfaction they felt in this new life was clear in every communication I had from them. Once a year I would visit them and marvel at the happiness they’d found.
When the time came for our own move we started looking in the only part of Cumbria I was at all familiar with, the villages and towns in the Eden Valley, close to Adam and Sharon’s village of Croglin.
Croglin, for all its beauty and idyllic rural location, doesn’t have a pub (at least not one that opens with any regularity). Kirkoswald has two. It also has a doctors’ surgery and a small general store. This was the obvious place to start, and as luck would have it, we didn’t have to look any further. We’d made note of a handful of rental properties to view, but once we saw Ivy Cottage we canceled those viewings and filled out an application.
Our cottage is old, cold and damp, but full of character, and it sits on the edge of the village, with a view of fields and hills. It provides more living space than either of us has had to ourselves before, including a spare room which doubles as a studio for me. The closest I came to having a separate art space before the move was a tiny shed on the patio of our shared house. Now I have a sunny room for all my art materials and desk, and views of lambs frolicking outside while I work.
The first week we moved (March 2016) we had no heating. We didn’t even have logs for the stove in the living room. We wore many clothes to bed and huddled by a small electric heater when we got dressed in the mornings. You could see your breath in every room in the house and we had no idea when the delivery of heating oil would arrive. Eventually it did, of course, and we soon began to feel at home with all our things around us. We would go for walks and on returning to the village would look down the hill at the little main street with its pubs and red stone houses, and say “I can’t believe we live here”. We still say this.
One day in the summer I went for a run. Half way to Croglin I had to stop to let a flock of sheep pass me on the road. In London, any interruption to my runs would cause me to panic and do that annoyingly pointless jogging on the spot that city runners do at traffic lights. Stopping, waiting and catching your breath is no bad thing when you’re just out for a gentle recreational jog, and I was happy to watch the sheep bundling past me along the country lane. I took a picture. I tweeted it.
Later that day a reporter from the local paper contacted me. He’d seen my tweet and thought that a city artist moving to the country would make a nice story. He gave me a lovely write up and a double page spread, and as a result of that I was commissioned to produce a large picture for a client to give her husband as a gift. Never underestimate the power of Twitter.
The article about me in the Cumberland NewsDouble page spread!
The most exciting thing to happen in our first year in Cumbria was Teddy. Getting a cat was always part of our plan but we needed to settle in, and get permission from the landlord. As soon as we paid our pet deposit and got the letter of permission we headed to the local rescue centre, Eden Animal Rescue. In an enclosure with three other kittens was the most beautiful tabby and white little girl. She purred when we picked her up. Within minutes of arriving home she had established herself, quite calmly, as a member of the household.
I can now hardly remember a time when I didn’t have to make frequent checks to see if Teddy was chewing the cellophane packaging on my greetings cards, or stepping onto a work in progress with muddy feet. She loves to drape herself around my neck while I’m at my desk and dribble happily onto whatever I happen to be working on. She naps on the spare bed while I draw, and grumbles in her sleep. She comes not just onto, but into our bed at night (yes, we totally indulge her) and crawls down under the covers next to me. She bites us when we don’t give her breakfast early enough, and leaves dead shrews under the tv. We can’t get enough of her.
My studio assistant, Teddy.
Recently I have been on sick leave from the bakery due to tendonitis in my right arm. I have used this time to really work hard at increasing my profile on Twitter, trying to drum up new commissions, and creating artwork that I can sell as prints (a watercolour of our local pub, which is proving quite popular). Going back to the factory will be tough, but I’ve had a taste of the freelance lifestyle and my most fervent desire is to become a full-time artist and illustrator. I want to manage my own time, do the things I love, spend more time in my lovely home, in my lovely village, with my lovely boyfriend, and sell things that make people happy. Maybe this coming year will bring me one step closer…
Have you ever had a dream come true? Seriously, something that you’ve longed for and dreamt about, and thought that most likely wouldn’t ever happen? And then, gradually, you realise that it actually could become a reality, and you start to plan and save, and search and work, and one day there you are, living the dream. Mostly. A few things could be better, or easier, but really, it’s close enough.
As a small child I wanted to live in the country. Well actually, what I repeatedly stated was that I wanted to live ‘in the wild’. I imagined myself communing with wildlife and being entirely self-sufficient. I devoured the books of Enid Blyton, including, notably, The Children of Cherry Tree Farm, The Children of Willow Farm and More Adventures on Willow Farm with their rosy depictions of country life as experienced by a family of city-born children, and a ‘wild man’ called Tammylan who lives in an actual cave.
Some versions of my dream included living in a cave, others a cottage with many, many pets. None of my stories included a man, incidentally, but I was only about eight or nine at the time. As I got older the dream persisted. As someone who has always preferred fantasy to reality I assumed that a life in the country would always stay a daydream and I would be doomed to scraping a living in London, surrounded by noise, dirt, people (so many people!) and ugliness.
Then I met Peter. He had a similar dream and similar views on so many other things (as well as similar humour, tastes, sense of silliness and a million other fantastic qualities) and there came a point that we started talking seriously about making the move together.
I think the important thing for both of us, and the thing which makes our relationship, and our new life in Cumbria work, is that we prioritise quality of life over almost everything else. Neither of us had an established (or particularly well-paid) career in London (I was an extra in films and tv: a fairly precarious way to make a living) and we didn’t really want to limit our choice of location by looking for jobs first. Foolhardy in some respects, but we checked out the lay of the land and figured we had a good chance of finding something once we’d narrowed down an area we liked. Additionally, I knew I wanted to place more of an emphasis on my art and learn better time-management skills in order to combine a day-job with an increasing artistic output.
Winter sunshine on the fells.
We found a three-bedroom cottage which (to our amazement) costs less to rent than the room we had in a shared house in London.
I’ve been lucky enough to find a job in a large commercial bakery/factory 1.5 miles down the road from our village, and six months ago I reduced my weekly hours from 38 to 31. The ultimate goal, of course, is to reduce the day job and increase the art income (which currently makes up for the reduction in wages almost exactly), and I can see myself being able to do this further in a year or so.
The ability to take pleasure in simple (preferably free) things is a huge advantage in this scenario. Having very much enjoyed certain aspects of London life, such as ready access to a host of pubs, restaurants, cinemas, theatres and other forms of entertainment, there might have been a concern that village life couldn’t compete on such a level and I’d get bored very quickly. Fortunately, while I enjoyed availing myself of these pleasures, they were never something I craved, and I find myself perfectly content with occasional excursions to the nearest town, or weekends away to a big city. In fact, even a weekend usually feels too long to be away from our lovely village and peaceful home life.
Sheep and mist
We spend our evenings in front of the fire with a DVD, a book, or music, and our weekends walking or just hanging out at home, or at one of the two very nice pubs the village has to offer. We can walk for three minutes and be in woodland or fields full of sheep and lambs, and we never cease to marvel at our gorgeous surroundings: the rolling fells with their patchwork fields and old stone walls, the soft feathery look of a distant copse on the slope of a hill, a red squirrel high in the tree tops or the clamour of a gaudy pheasant who flaps suddenly upwards, away from our approach. These are the things that provide fulfilment, moments shared with the person I love, and the sheer majesty of the natural world.
