Idleness

Hut Time

October 4, 2014 by Susan

We have had a manic September full of satisfying if not always pleasurable activities. Saturday Live last week had an article about happiness Paul Dolan said that we needed a balance between pleasure and purpose to be happy. I feel like September has been a month encompassing both of those. However we had had a couple of weeks full of purposefulness but not so much pleasure and then in contrast we had 3 blissful nights spent at our friends’ beach hut. I have blogged a few times about this place possibly most significantly in my Bath Tub Places post and my Super Sundays post where I blogged about how it provided a light-bulb moment to change our lifestyle patterns.

So Thursday arrived; I finished my maths class, dashed to Lidl to grab some shopping, drove Ruth from college to Robin Hill for work came home and waited for Martin to arrive back from work. I shoved on my wellies jumped into the van and and headed straight for Thorness as quickly as possible. And then we stopped rushing.

We spent the time mooching on the beach,

drinking wine.

watching the birds,

playing games,

reading and doing puzzles,

enjoying the candlelight,

watching a very unexpected hovercraft landing.

and taking photos, watching sunsets and sunrises, and really just generally relaxing.

Once again we feel so lucky to live here and so grateful to generous friends.

Puckpool Park Picnic

May 16, 2013 by Susan

Had our second picnic of the year today. I got out and dusted off my lovely tiffin tin (it was very dusty as last year was so wet we didn’t use it once).

We had a sunny afternoon in Puckpool Park – luckily I could sit in the shade and hide under my summer shawl. Had a great time with lots of Zonie friends and a great way to celebrate a couple of birthdays.

Is This How Other People Spend Saturdays?

January 20, 2013 by Susan

I think I probably have a romanticised view of the relaxed, stress-free weekends that other people have and I don’t achieve but this weekend we had an unusually relaxed Saturday.

Music Centre cancelled – which meant that even though I wasn’t going to go anyway (due to bad weather) I now didn’t need to feel guilty about it either! So I spent a good chunk of the morning in bed finishing off my book, Martin brought me tea and chocolate digestives so it was a good and relaxed start.

Then a bit of time blogging about the snow.

Lunch of last night’s leftovers – nice and easy.

A trip into town where we only shopped in small independent shops, the butchers (ironically for vegetarian haggis), The chocolatier (Montezuma chocolate buttons), the health food shop (large packet dried yeast), the newsagent (The Guardian for a photography project for Rebekah) and Ginger the greengrocers for a chat with the lovely proprietor! Even Martin enjoyed the shopping trip and he usually hates shopping.

Back home and a lovely Baileys latte – but unfortunately not the champagne truffles I had been saving for this relaxed occasion as I realised I had accidentally packaged them and sent them off to my mum for her birthday – opps – will need to send the correct ones off! However I did have some of the Montezuma chocolate to have with the latte so it was still lovely.

Then reading the papers and a game of scrabble with Martin and Jonathan.

An easy dinner of bangers and mash.

A game of Carcassone.

A hot bath with choral evensong and a murder mystery.

An episode or two of Grey’s Anatomy

And off to bed.

This is the Saturday that I always imagine other people have and don’t usually manage myself, relaxed doing just what I feel like at the time, no hassle and no outside pressures – lovely. And it fits in with my new years resolution to be more idle and to read more 🙂

No pics in this blog post so martin won’t be happy!

Good Friday

April 7, 2012 by Susan

We had a really, really good Good Friday.

We started with an early (for us) morning and headed down to the church. Then we had an elicit exchange of dairy-free eggs and got ourselves sorted out for the Good Friday meditation we were taking.

We stole the script for the meditation based on the last words of Jesus from Kingdom Story

We ended with recording of the lovely Aled Jones (definitely getting middle aged, but he has such a lovely tone to his voice) singing Abide With Me (Martin’s favourite hymn) and this image that we took of the cross at St Benet’s Abbey on the Norfolk Broads.

Then we just had to hang about and prepare for being the final destination of the walk of witness, rearrange the chairs, butter some hot crossed buns, sort out the PA stuff, make some tea and coffee. But we had about 3 hours to do all this, Ruth took the little ones to the park, Rebekah and Jamie went for a coffee and we just pottled about in church, in quite an idle manner!

The walk of witness arrived, babies cried, songs were sung and lots of drinks and hot crossed buns were distributed.

Then we sat around for a long time with friends and coffee.

Next home.

Jonathan and I had cleared the area around the fire place and had made a cross from the sticks in the garden to put up.

I tidied up our cupboard surface with our Lent stuff on.

Jonathan updated our very behind lent lamb calendar

I put up the cross picture that I made.

I managed to find time to listen to the last instalment of the excellent Peoples Passiondrama on the iplayer. I read an article that said that religious broadcasting has almost disappeared around the Christian celebrations but I have to say that I have been very impressed with the variety, quantity and quality of the broadcasts relating to the passion on Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra during Holy Week.

We also have an Easter tree that Ruth went out to pilfer from the cycle path.

We had a leisurely afternoon spending some of it looking at Jonathan’s bouncing egg and making a lot of quiche for dinner (always a joint effort as Rebekah makes better pastry and I make a better filling) and rebekah also made a batch of truly delicious hot crossed buns.

We sat and ate a very very leisurely dinner, drank a yummy bottle of red wine (which we unfortunately now have to give a small share of to Rebekah) and sat and had a great lot of conversation ranging from theology, to holiday to moral dilemmas to parenting. The girls said some lovely things about us, but Martin said that Rebekah must have been under the influence of the wine!!!

We had a great day because there were lots of times to not be in a hurry, to sit and chat and take our time. It reminded me that we need to get back to being more idle and not to just rush and be busy all the time but to really slow down and appreciate the here and now, savour time with family and friends and time alone and with God.

Needed A Day Like This

December 24, 2011 by Susan

Martin had been saying for a couple of weeks that he needed a holiday so at the end of November I decided that even though we didn’t have time to have an actual holiday we could manage a night away. We could do the Saturday night, we have no duties at church the next morning, there were no kids activities going on that we need to get people to and from it was just a case of finding someone to have the children and a hotel with a swimming pool that we could actually afford! Luckily we have good friends and after a couple of false starts the children were farmed out to various friends (thank you Elaine and Andrea).

So we had all day Saturday and Sunday morning to ourselves to fully relax in. We had been feeling pretty stressed again, particularly Martin and a grabbed afternoon in the pub the previous Saturday had only highlighted to us that we had moved away from the ideas of including plenty of idleness in our lives and were heading towards manic over business and ineffective activity yet again.

So when we got into the car to head out on Saturday morning and the track playing in the car was Needed A Day Like This by the lovely Paul Bell we really felt we were doing the right thing.

No alarms today
No phones to ring I’m just…
Waking up with the sun and my love
No work today
No bills to pay
It’s just you and me my love.
And today, the world just melts away

I needed a day like this
I needed a day like this

No demands
And no firm plans
We’ve got all the time in the world my love
No plots to hatch
No trains to catch
It’s just you and me my love
And today, the world just melts away
And today, the world just melts away

We had lunch at the always tasty Chale Green Stores and then headed out towards Sandown and our hotel. We were passing the Botanic gardens and decided to stop there for an afternoon walk.

There were brilliant colours and amazing textures and we relaxed, chatted and took photos.

We headed to the hotel (Melville Hall) where there were two unexpected bonuses – a four poster bed in the room and much more impressively an outdoor hot tub. We nipped straight into the hot tub (it was closing shortly) and lay in the hot water watching the stars gradually come out and feeling very very relaxed! We didn’t feel in need of a restaurant meal and it was a nice evening so despite the time of year we headed out to eat fish and chips on the beach. Back to the bar for a drink and a couple of games of crib (only a couple we won one each and weren’t going to risk marital disharmony by playing another).

We were very impressed that the hotel room also had proper wine glasses and more importantly a tea pot!

We headed down to Quarr Abbey for morning tea and cake and after an exceptioanlly long wait got a very attractive set of drinks and a somewhat disappointing slice of shortbread. Nerissa assures me that their cakes are lovely though so we’lll have to go back and try again another day!

So we were happily relaxed when we got back to the kids and determined to make sure we had some time each month when we spent at least an afternoon to ourselves just relaxing with no agenda.