01. Fog and gumtrees for Tuesday’s swim (not my usual pool).
Tag Archives: swimming
Show-off Holiday Post – Fiji
Just to be clear, in the past, I’ve never had two tropical island holidays within one year (or even two, three, four or five years!) and I’m unlikely to be so lucky again… but 2023 has delivered ten days in Hawaii and a week in Fiji. Continue reading
Things That Are Making Me Happy This Week
01. Lightscape – 2km of lights and plants. My favourite installation was the dandelion seeds suspended in the air, and I loved the geometric projection onto the Kashmir Cypress. Continue reading
Things That Are Making Me Happy This Week
01. I’ve been to numerous fashion exhibitions at the National Gallery of Victoria but I think Alexander McQueen has been the best – loved how his work was displayed alongside paintings, clothing and other artifacts that provided the inspiration for his collections. And the work and detail in the pieces was astounding. Continue reading
Things That Are Making Me Happy This Week
01. A day in Castlemaine: Continue reading
Things That Are Making Me Happy This Week
01. Sunsets and a full week of perfect beach weather. Continue reading
Things That Are Making Me Happy This Week
01. In my happiest of places. Continue reading
Things That Are Making Me Happy This Week
01. My baby who’s been away the longest returned home this week. He spent five months in Europe – his favourite places were Montenegro (which is where the pic above was taken), Lapland (below), and the city of Brussels. Continue reading
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka
The things I love about swimming:
- the immediate sense of relaxation as soon as I dive in
- watching the tiles on the bottom as I churn through laps – it’s my meditation
- the ritual – from the order of my laps to the way I roll my towel and bathers post-swim
- the lingering smell of chlorine or the grit of salt
The specifics: I’m a medium-laner; always a 50-metre pool; always outdoors (all year round).
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka is a novel in two parts. The first is about an indoor pool and its swimmers. Swimming can be a great leveler, and Otsuka captures this in her descriptions –
We suffer from bad backs, fallen arches, shattered dreams, broken hearts, anxiety, melancholia, anhedonia, the usual aboveground afflictions. Continue reading
Wintering by Katherine May
The subtitle of Katherine May’s memoir-meets-nature-writing, Wintering, is ‘The power of rest and retreat in difficult times’. The subtitle might suggest a how-to guide for coping with pandemics but that’s not the case.
Instead, May’s gentle book examines the cues that flora and fauna take from the weather; and the human response to the cold, including winter recreation (saunas and rolling in snow); and rituals and customs.
Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Continue reading