Late summer

UK weather has been off this summer. We had a few weeks of good summer weather at the start of June and then it all got a bit sh!t.

But here we are in September and we are having a heatwave. In fact today, 7 September, may be the hottest day of the year so far.

I’m taking advantage of the warm weather to take a boat home.

It’s a convoluted route but today I thought I needed to do something different, something to put things into perspective. Seeing the buildings of Canary Wharf disappear in the distance like so many crazy Lego shapes has been soothing. Being in the middle of the wide river, seeing fellow passengers get splashed by random waves, with the sun shining down and making everything sparkly… it’s great. It makes me smile.

I haven’t written a lot of contemporary personal stuff this year. Several reasons for this: starting a new job; devoting my creative time to working on my novel draft for the Edit Your Novel course; reading more to avoid writing; changing my route to work so I no longer have those long stretches of time where I could bang out blog post; and kind of sort of feeling like I’m a bit over this whole blogging thing.

Let’s see if I can rekindle that feeling over the coming months.

I joined a choir this year. It’s one of those activities that I spend the day dreading. “Oh no, I have to have an early dinner tonight so I can get out to choir by 7pm. *sigh* I would rather stay home and watch TV.”

But when I go (and I go more often than not), I enjoy it. I have to concentrate on my notes, but I’m surrounded by other voices so I can’t hear my notes, so sometimes I’m singing someone else’s notes but the choir motto is “sing something” so I don’t feel bad if I get it wrong.

We do pop songs mostly, some folk, and some sea shanties. Of course we are approaching that year end season that starts with C so no doubt there will be some seasonal songs added to our repertoire as well.

Although I’m six months in to my new job I still feel I don’t know what I’m doing. It was a relief to hear another colleague say they also doesn’t know what they’re doing but they keep a serious face all the time and that helps. People assume if you look serious you know what’s going on.

I don’t think I can carry off the serious face thing. I think I have a sad or worried face, and that means people will suspect I don’t know anything.

Maybe this will all make sense one day.

In the meantime, I will keep looking for things that make me happy outside of work, things that keep me calm, that take me out of my head and into a better space.

Like choir.

Like reading.

Like a boat ride after work on a sunny day.