Lynne Rees's Blog, page 13

F*** It! Mud: a Mantra for Running & Life

Off-road runners know about mud. After rain, a squelchy footpath through woods or across a field that gradually clogs up the treads on your shoes until you feel you’re running with foot weights. Then there’s MUD: a whipped-up quagmire of slippery sludge and ankle-deep pools from edge to edge along a stretch of track with no hedgerow to clamber along, no parallel path to take. 

You can turn back, retrace your steps and find another route. Or you can try and pick your way through the best of the worst, aiming for the firmest looking areas. But, let’s be honest, the chance of getting through it without a soggy sock and shoe-full is unlikely. 

There was no chance of turning around while running through Hurst Wood in Kent with Meopham & Malling Ladies Joggers a couple of winters ago. A few of the group had tackled a really long muddy stretch without too much collateral damage and were waiting for the rest of us at the end of the track. I was attempting to pick my way across some likely patches of weight-bearing mud until I slipped into  a puddle and sank to my shins in muck. 
And that’s when I invoked Fuck It! Mud for the first time. ‘Fuck it!’ I yelled and bolted along the track regardless of where my feet fell, kicking up water, mud (possibly some small amphibians!) leaves and sticks, until I reached the end to be greeted by cheers and laughter. 
I’ve invoked Fuck It! Mud many times since then. Sometimes for running: half-marathon training when achieving my first 10 miler seemed an impossibility;  after I sprained both ankles last year, didn’t allow them enough time to heal, and had to start building miles and time from zero over a period of six months. Then at other times for life’s trials and hitches: the complications of a house sale, the anxiety of presenting a university paper I could have easily cancelled. Each time I said ‘Fuck it!’ and pushed ahead, towards and through the difficulties, unpleasantness and doubts, with an eye on arriving at my destination. And I reached each one, even if I did collect some metaphorical mud in my shoes on the way.
You are welcome to invoke Fuck It! Mud yourself. But remember it can only be invoked for facing a challenge head-on, for pushing towards and through all obstacles in your way to reach the other side. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes you surprise yourself. But at the end you are always your own champion.  
Easy mud

Fish in the orchard

Fish in the orchard

I am not surprised to see him
in the long wet grass between the apple trees
because I know what we are all capable of 
when we act with conviction.

Not that we have to swim against the tide,
do the opposite of what’s expected
to be noticed. The same road or river,
the same worn path offers itself up

to us: bright green leaves of dandelion
in a crack of tarmac, the sound water
makes over rock, our footsteps adding
to the memory of other footsteps

on the hard packed earth. We are always
at the beginning of something.

My Honey Dilemma

When I was a child in the 1960s the honey sold in the local Co-op was Gale’s but I was only interested in the ‘thick’ one that I loved to spread on toast for breakfast. If my mother had bought the ‘runny’ one instead I’d pass on the honey in favour of Bramble Seedless jam. 
These days I use clear, pourable honey in my spiced tea. I add a squirt or two to my homemade vegetable soup to temper the acidity of tomato. I drizzle it on roasted carrots. I whisk it into cream to dollop on apple cake or pie. And I make hot toddies with it, adding lemon juice, nutmeg and a shot of whisky.
But I still prefer a creamy set honey spread on buttered toast. At least I thought I did until I tasted Sarah’s Acacia Honey with Mixed Berries.
‘Taste this,’ I said to my husband, handing him a slice of toasted corn bread.
‘Ooh,’ he said. (In a much more manly way than it looks on the page!) 
Because it seems that after 50 years I’ve found an alternative response to my childhood predicament of choosing bramble jam over runny honey. Mix them together and create this fruity and sweet concoction of deliciousness! 
And I should now be able to tell you that I stopped there and didn’t open the jar of Sarah’s Honey with Ginger until breakfast the following morning. But I can’t. There was a set honey v runny honey dilemma to solve after all. 
Sarah’s Wonderful Honey is blended and packaged by the family run firm, Mileeven, based in Co Kilkenny, one of the leading honey suppliers in Ireland, and I have been reading their website like a book: how they started, their products, recipes, and answers to FAQs, some of which I didn’t know I wanted to ask:
Q. Why is some honey 'set'?Set honey is just a variation on the consistency. There is nothing else added to it to make it set. Some honeys have a thicker consistency naturally - like sunflower or rape seed honey.
But my favourite page is Everything Bees:
In her lifetime a bee will make 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey and will fly the equivalent of two times around the world.
That’s enough to make me appreciate every drop of honey I will ever eat during the rest of my life.  
I think it’s true that we are now far more aware of honey’s natural health-giving properties, and its power to heal, than we were during the last fifty years of the 20th century. The development of life-saving antibiotics inevitably led to a decline in the appreciation of natural remedies, honey being one of them with a healing reputation stretching back to Ancient Greece and Egypt. And it was still being used in the treatment of wounds right up to World War II. 
But there’s no reason why drug-based and natural medicines can’t work together, with the latter generally being the better option for colds and flu, coughs and sore throats.
And I guess we are so very lucky that honey tastes so very good too. Forget about ‘a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine goes down’. Honey is the medicine. 
But back to my set honey v runny honey dilemma. Has it been resolved? Have I been converted? 

Sarah’s Honey with Ginger is melt in the mouth gorgeous with a lovely kick of warmth. But I’m not ready to publish my findings yet. After all, there’s still Acacia Honey with Nuts, Warming Honey with Cinnamon, and Zingy Honey with Lemon left to try and it's important that my research is thorough, isn't it? 
I may be some time. As Winnie the Pooh said about honey, "Eat and eat then repeat."

Rope, Running, Trees

I threw out a rope and gathered in the frost, the leaf-mulched paths, sunlight, the bumpy clatter of wood-pigeons overhead, ice shattered by cars over puddles, the sound of a golf ball before it flew through the air, Beechin Wood, Pigeon’s Green, Potash Lane, pot-holes, sudden hollows, a short stink of methane at the back of the quarry, the snuffle of a horse behind a hedge, a duck pond, dogs and their walkers, and all kinds of trees that accompanied my steps, my breath all the way out and home again. 

Running through History: Snodland, Paddlesworth, Birling

Let us praise the small roads, the ones we know by place names not numbers: Paddlesworth Road, Birling Hill, Snodland Road. Let us praise being sure of where we have come from or where we are heading to. And let us praise their raised shoulders of earth crowned with trees, a sudden slap of a red post box on a bend, a memory of quenched thirst sunk into an old stone wall.  Let us praise too those who walk, ride and run them, adding their footsteps to the centuries of history, to the stories sitting behind us, and the one we are moving through that never, even if we do, really ends. 

We Fly

The garland of plastic icicles
has yellowed to the colour
of old bones.

Less frozen water
and more the evidence of age
of lives lived

as if all our days
have compressed around the marrow
of joy and loss, fear and gain.

We are tough and brittle.
We walk and we fall and even 
without wings we fly.


With warm wishes for Christmas 2017 and the New Year

haiku

          a tray of eggs
          homesick now 
          for middle age




          Modern Haiku 46.3 Autumn 2015

Strawberries in November

There’s a lesson here, perhaps,
that even the beautiful can be discarded.

Or another lesson, that there’s a time
for everything, or that change is inevitable,

and other dog-eared philosophical scraps
we try and make sense of the world with.

So let’s get back to the here and now:
the poly-tunnels empty, a shoulder-high

slump of bags and plants and then
the unexpected scent as I run past

like the sweet ghost of summer
lingering in the autumn sun.

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