I used to write a lot of irreverent blogs about being 'a bit too fat'. As a topic, I suppose it became my speciality. This is partly because, being British, I'm naturally compelled to make disparaging comments about my own appearance for everyone else's amusement...but it's also because that's how I genuinely spent my entire…
At the moment life feels pretty serious, what with all the fears and stresses of the worldwide pandemic, and the way the threat of illness is changing the minutiae of our lives in so many unexpected ways. COVID-19 is forcing us to realise how fragile the systems we base our lives on are, and how…
Continue reading ➞ How yoga can help you have more fun in life
I'm 30 soon. All my late twenties, 30 has loomed like a cloaked figure on a misty street, one gnarled finger beckoning me to some dark and terrible fate involving wrinkles, grey hairs, dead eggs, big bills, bigger hangovers, new fat deposits and a keener sense of my own mortality. Interestingly, the closer I creep…
Continue reading ➞ 10 quickfire reasons why I’m happy to be nearly 30
There's nothing more annoying than some self-professed wellbeing expert telling you how to live your life in the middle of a government-enforced lock-down. Especially when it's threatening your livelihood and riddling you with anxious visions of a summer spent in a darkened room spooning jam into your mouth under your face-mask because all those people…
Continue reading ➞ 5 activities to improve your wellbeing during coronavirus lock-down
I'm sitting in an almost empty airport in San Jose after a zippy drive up the Pacific coast through the dawn with a really friendly taxi driver who treated me to The Best of Red Hot Chili Peppers for most of the way. My lack of Spanish meant we couldn't talk much, but he smiled…
I'm writing this blog in a grassy clearing at the top of a jungle-covered mountain overlooking the bright blue Pacific ocean. I've just spent the last hour or so climbing some scarily steep, rubbly hills to get up here so I am disgustingly sweaty. I am also, slightly unnervingly, being circled by vultures. Still, I'm…
Continue reading ➞ I just qualified as a yoga teacher… shame the world is ending
Today, while walking barefoot in the surf of a Costa Rican beach in a happy, slightly disconnected daze, I caught a flicker of dazzling blue from the corner of my eye. My first thought was that it was a bit of plastic, because it seemed so unnaturally blue, but upon closer inspection I realised it…
I feel like I've been here in Costa Rica for months. In reality it's only been 5.5 days, and only four of them have been at yoga school, which is where I am now, by a beautiful brook in the jungle inhabited by iguanas, geckos, dragonflies, monkeys, sloths and about a bazillion unseen noisy little…
It's about 2am in Costa Rica. I woke up an hour ago because my body thought it was 7am, which - at home in the UK, it was. Usually waking up naturally at the same time every day is useful for things like getting to work and going for a smug early jog, but not…
I love going on adventures but I really, really, really hate packing. I don't know why I hate it so much; it must be my Achilles heal, or athlete's foot. I find myself doing absolutely ANYTHING else but pack in the lead up to any impending departure. I do housework, I write poems, I start…
