My new website is up and running. Want to see? OK clicky here-y!!

I haven’t decided where I’m taking my yoga teaching now I’ve moved to Cambridge. I don’t think it matters that I don’t know where I’m going with it. I’m certainly not worried about it. I have so much else going on in my life and so many things I want to do. Right now I just want to put the information up and see what becomes of it. If it just becomes a community yoga website, or a rescourse for yoga and scoliosis or yoga and chronic pain and I just continue as I am, subbing classes as and when, well I’m fine with that.

I was lucky enough to do everything I needed to do with my yoga teaching when I ran Thames Yoga, I even ran a retreat in Turkey. I fulfilled every ambition I had and that is an amazing thing.

Right now I’m enjoying working on my own practice, and having most of my evenings free!

Back to the website – take a look and let me know if you see any glaringly obvious errors. Also if you know of any websites that you’d like to go on the links page then let me know.

It’s been a rollercoaster of a week and on this Sunday afternoon in November I feel somewhat drained by it all. But the rollercoaster has brought with it some amazing things. The two most important are somewhat interconnected and need some backstory.

Learning to Love London Again and the Return of my Writing Mojo

It only took two and a half months of living elsewhere. On Wednesday night, for a moment, I missed London. Don’t get me wrong, moving out of London was the best thing I’ve done in a long time, but I guess it’s natural I will miss it occassionally – I lived there for ten years after all.

On examination however it wasn’t London per se that I missed – it was a specific part of London. A part I haven’t visited for a long long time. A part, I’m sorry to say, I have never visited with Himself.

When I first moved to London as a wide-eyed 25-year-old the Ex and I lived in a gorgeous flat in a beautiful Georgian house conversion in Highgate. It was like my dream of what London should be. We had parks, we had Coleridge’s house, we had a cemetery (where EVERYONE is buried), we had Hampstead Heath just across from us in which we had Keats House. My writing muse had never been stronger than it was there. I wrote all the time. I wrote for the Ham and High paper. I wrote for the local magazine Buzz. I wrote my first (unpublished and will undoubtedly remain so) novel. Looking back it was wonderful (I look back with rose coloured spectacles here of course, it wasn’t that wonderful as my health was diabolical – but isn’t nostalgia and hindsight all about forgetting the bad stuff?).

We were there for just under a year – then we moved and everything started fucking me off and my hate-hate affair with London began.

Over the last week or so my writing muse has returned for the first time in ages. To put this in perspective I have written two mediocre poems in the last twelve months and that’s it. No magazine articles, no short stories and the only thing I’ve added to my in progress novel is a comma, which, like Oscar Wilde, I later removed. (Please note the only resemblance I have to the genius of Wilde is my constant input and output of commas, nothing else. I would never assume such arrogance!) This week I have written the first draft of a poem and a short story which just may amount to something and have sent off a little something to a magazine.

And so I remember Highgate. And I want to go back and take Himself. I want to show him my past. It feels important and necessary. We’re going before Christmas and I’m excited.

Other things to be thankful for this week
* Being given two weeks’ worth of cover teaching for a yoga teacher I hold in very high regard.
* The latest nephew being born without a hitch and absolutely perfect apparently!
* Doing a presentation at a sixth form open evening for work and making lots of good networking connections. This also made me feel nostalgic for my years at sixth form and especially the Latin stall at open evenings. I ran the A Level Latin stall two years in a row. Hardly anyone ever came
* Solo Acoustic Everlong.
* My new Foo tshirt.
* A day off with Himself, drinking Christmas flavoured soy latte in Starbucks and discussing the future.
* Yoga with my mum.
* Walking with my face against a November storm.