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Readers, I would love it if you could join me in wishing a very happy first birthday to my little clinic!  Can you believe I’ve been open a whole year today?  I had four clients on that first Monday and I can still remember the butterflies in my tummy waking up a year ago today, not knowing what the future held!

Oh and what a year it has been!  I’ve worked my little fingers to the bone to increase my client base, get my website to the top of Google, get my name and brand known in the local area, think up the zaniest special offers, work out my niche market and here I am at the start of 2012 with enough regular clients to keep me ticking over and new enquiries all the time.

It’s not all been roses though, there have been some really hard times, some long dark tea-times of the soul, some times (like when we got back from Australia) when I really wondered if this was going to work.  But so far so good *crossed fingers*!

So I just wanted to say a huge thank you to all of you for every word of support and encouragement, every client, everyone who has been to a yoga class, or spread the word, or handed out flyers.  Thank you thank you thank you!!!!

Here’s to the next 12 months!

As you know from my About page, we live in a falling down house on the very edge of Cambridge UK. Cambridge is a funny town (sorry City, it is a City even though it only has 125,00 residents – we have a charter from King John or something that proves this). If it weren’t for the world famous University, Cambridge would be a tiny and rather insignificant market town in the middle of the East Anglian Fens. When you come to the edges of it you hit flat, rather bleak countryside.

Looking out the back of our house there is nowt but fields. Above is the view from the bedroom window.

When we first moved here I was so enamoured with the space and the lack of light pollution after over a decade in London that I would walk over the fields every chance I got.  It felt as though my lungs weren’t big enough to deal with all that air!

But then you settle.  You get used to your new surroundings.  New becomes commonplace and life gets busier.  We’ve just come out of an 18 month period of being car-less and when you are cycling over 6 miles every day and on your feet all day for work, going for a walk slips pretty low down the list of priorities.

Recently though I’ve begun to realise how important it is to reconnect with our immediate environments.  How often do we go through the motions of our commute to work, no matter what form of transport it is on, without noticing what is passing us by?  When I used to work in the City, the most ancient, and my own personal favourite area of London, I used to see all the workers like little ants, rushing from meeting to meeting, never once looking up at the breath-taking architecture, the mind-blowing history through which they were walking.

And the internet doesn’t help much either.  Yes there’s a lot of connection here, a lot of support and a lot of joy.  But there’s a lot to be said for looking up from that little glowing palm-sized window to the world occassionally and looking out of the actual window.  I’m as guilty as charged with the internet thing but slowly, slowly I’m trying to let it go and have time each week completely away from the computer, completely away from work.  Time for me and the world around me.

I am reconnecting by being kind, by listening, by accepting who I am right now (a very different person to who I was even a year ago).  I am disconnecting to reconnect to the person I have become.

How about you?

Missed part one? Read it here!

The Guided Busway, the great innovation for Cambridgeshire’s public transport sysstem. Buses that run on specially built tracks to beat the traffic and on special biofuels to beat pollution. Brilliant. They did it in Adelaide. Apparently we cannot manage it here.

(note abandoned bicycle on busway)

The latest news is that there will be up to a further five years of delays (it’s been going for about five hundred years already). It has costs gajillions of pounds. The whole county is up in arms.

Me? I’m not that bothered because the busway has a cyclepath the whole way along it and makes my travels around Cambridge so much safer. Much rather be cycling along here than along the road.

Although it is probably the most expsensive cyclepath in the world….

I don’t post this purely for international readers to have a good laugh at the lunacy that is British bureaucracy (although that is one reason – seriously if this had been built anywhere else in the world it would have been finished years ago), but rather as an everyday lesson in looking on the bright side.

Life serves lemons and curve balls left right and centre.  It throws us off balance.  Our innate human natures, our Egos (capital E), make us want to sit down and have a big old moan, a big old cry, a big old shout about it.  And that’s OK.  Just don’t shout for too long because if you do you might miss the glorious alternative that is right in front of you.

Because who wants to sit on a stinky old bus when you could be cycling along next to this?