A link to a ‘Resurgence’ online page. “Resurgence magazine speaks to those seeking a balanced and peaceful lifestyle.”  I can’t work out whether I was slow before I began receiving these bi-monthly magazines a few years ago or not, but slow I am, or perhaps that could sound rather derogatory, so I prefer to think of myself and lifestyle as being even, taking the middle path. I don’t really know how to describe it. The ethos is the same anyway. Years of yoga and meditation means I’m not talking here about physical speed but the rate at which I allow my mind to travel and the steps I take to slow it down or deal with ‘monkey mind’.

I never was one to run for a bus in the days I caught busses, and that’s despite having been a cross country runner! No, slow will have to do just as long as no one equates my slowness with being half soaked, thick, challenged, dense, stupid or inadequate. Well, they can equate . . . just don’t tell me.

As I think up these words and write them a young boy is outside one of my kitchen windows kicking a ball against it. His mother’s partner is shouting at their dog, which they never take for a walk, his brother is upstairs in his room which is above my study area at the end of the kitchen and he has a computer or television on extremely loudly, and their mother periodically goes outside their back door for a fag and seems to shout indiscriminately. The mother of one of the adults lives two doors down and goes into her workshop in the old barn that my kitchen backs on to, and she likes to saw up wood she finds with a circular saw, for hours on end.

So, I am all for Slow Sundays, Slow Everydays, and I think I have made a good attempt at achieving that in my life, what I really, really, really want are Quiet Sundays and Quieter Everydays.

Here’s one of the things I did today, I assisted my dog grooming friend Carolyn to wash, dry and brush twelve month old Dusty, a Rough Collie. He’d never been ‘done’ before and he was marvellous. I was rather wet at the end of it but I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Every so often there’s a large and very furry dog that Carolyn needs assistance with and I am pleased to be the person she asks. I love Dusty now. I chose Summer Berries conditioner for him and he appreciated that I wore an apron with pictures of sheep on it.