Snow, rain, more snow, no snow, so much weather talk. Work, teamwork, housework, homework. Stress in myriad forms. GSCE revision, bullying, parenting, ageing. Considering the reality of impending menopause and what that means, questioning mental acuity; keeping emotions in check; functioning on a day-to-day basis. Another month cocooned in a plastic-wrapped house hopefully pinning images to virtual picture boards. I’ve started running regularly. Not enough, and not far enough, but more than the nothing that I’d been doing. I have run up and down hills and been told by my youngest child that I wouldn’t have been able to do that not so long ago. She was right. I’ve started a writing course and, naturally, fallen behind, but have written countless vignettes, some only sentences, or words – crimson – that suggest potential yet to be explored. Storytelling is a release, forcing open doors and windows and allowing their inhabitants to exit. Good for the soul, and good for those of us who struggle to convey things through the spoken word (even if we appear to talk incessantly.) Over the holiday weekend we drove coast to coast, west to east, chasing the sea air. Such is the nature of dispersed relatives. We walked on beaches, a treat for us land-locked prisoners in our scaffold cage. Head-clearing air, cold and fat with foamy spray. In the west we watched a farmer drag a dead sheep along the beach, her bloated carcass weighing almost as much as him. He limped the length of the beach, grasping her by one leg, before stopping to catch his breath and consider how to negotiate the final stretch. No one offered to help. In the east we searched for sea glass and mourned the sand that’s been washed away in the storms, pondering for how long East Anglia will continue to be the jutty out bit when it’s disappearing at its current rate. The views are stunning but sooner or later the sea comes to claim its prize. There has been much eating of Easter chocolate. A promise made to myself at the beginning of the year when I started the serious business of shedding the middle-aged excess that had made itself far too at home. Now, of course, it means duplicating my efforts, but in true Sisyphean fashion I’ll stick at it.
I’ll give this year’s March a generous 7/10. Over to you April…