Pause. Step back a moment. - Day 28

28th December 2018

28 is the curing time for concrete - curing concrete is the term used for stopping freshly
poured concrete from drying out too quickly. This is done because concrete, if left to dry out of
its own accord, will not develop the full bond between all of its ingredients. It will be weaker
and tend to crack. During curing hydration occurs, allowing calcium-silicate hydrate (C-S-H) to form.
Over 90% of a mix's final strength is typically reached within 28 days. Concrete is the most
used construction material in the world.

I'm back to work today. I have new clothes to wear, a few treats in my bag to cheer me during the day and the music from Hansel and Gretel as an earworm. 

I am in awe of the lady who wrote today's post - it is candid and well balanced, but it must have been hard putting her thoughts onto the page. I would like to thank her for her contribution (she is a regular writer for the series) and also for being such a valued member of the HR and L&D social media-linked community.

Today's post is by Rachel Burnham, a learning and development consultant, sketch-noter and designer based near Manchester. Rachel works with trainers, L&D professionals and HR teams to help them modernise their approaches and become more effective. Rachel, as you can surmise from the sketchnoting is highly creative. The photographs for today's piece are taken by Rachel herself. Rachel is a talented lady. She writes an excellent L&D focused blog - L & D Matters and is active on social media (you can follow her on Twitter via @BurnhamLandD). When not drawing, reading or helping others to learn, Rachel enjoys spending time with her nearest and dearest and has a passion for gardening (as you can tell from the below piece). She is also a keen jazz aficionado - a cultured lady. Reading between the lines you can see that 2018 has been a challenging year for Rachel but that she has found a way through. She is brave, resourceful, honest and resilient.

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Pause. Step back a moment.

In the spring of 2017, my son and I took a day trip from the island of Mykonos, to the nearby island of Delos.  This was our second trip to Greece – part of the big shake up in our family life.  Sam is a history nerd and so we spend these trips visiting museums and archeological sites – the only beaches I have visited in Greece have had nearby ruins and that’s fine with me – I am getting a great second-hand classical education and it is rather wonderful when an adult child chooses to have you as a holiday companion.

It was a hot day – deep clear blue sky and even early in the morning it was blazing hot.  The island of Delos is one huge archeological site – one fascinating ruin, statue, and pillar after another – far more than it is really possible to take in in a single day.  And on this April morning it was also full of wild flowers – self-seeded all through the walls and floors were vivid red poppies, purple mallow, chamomile, vetch - cousins of garden plants I know and love here in the UK, but smaller, more intensely coloured and billowing everywhere across this small island.  As the heat intensified, we explored the remains of villas, shops, streets, temples and a theatre.  Buildings once grand and lavish – though I was captivated by a drain from some indoor plumbing and the complex water tank system used to store water captured from the roof of the theatre.

Half-way up a hill, we turned in to the courtyard and colonnade of a villa, which seemed more sturdy and upright than many of the other parts of the site.  And in these rooms found the most wonderful, not-much damaged mosaic floors. 

We looked and looked at them.

I love mosaics.  As a child I remember seeing Roman mosaics found in the UK shown on television – probably Blue Peter.  I had a phase of cutting up magazines to create piles of colour-ordered roughly rectangle scraps of paper, which I then used to make mosaic pictures. Tesserae from paper. It took hours. I’m not sure I would ever have the patience now.

When you look closely at a mosaic you sometimes lose sight of the picture – of the images, pattern and story.  As you focus, you home in on the tesserae and pick out the mix of shades and colours – the individual tiny tiles that the artist used to create their picture with.   Sometimes as you focus in on an area representing the sea or sky you are able to distinguish the mix of hues – shades of blue, dark and stormy,cornflower, to the palest blue, and mixed in a stone or two of sea-green, or a speckle of white and cream or brightest of all a gleam of gold.

And that is what my year has been – a mosaic.  Some stormy blue days of heartache, many many days of the palest blue of work and home and the doing of life, a taste of sea-green and speckles of pure gold. 

Part of the heartache for me is that this is my first full year since I separated from my husband, after 33 years together – which has been a very sad thing, but through recognizing that things had gone wrong between us, also has led to new hopes and a new phase in our lives.  We continue to share a house and I am incredibly proud that we have both worked at finding a way to still be a family.  Somehow we are finding our way back to being good friends.

I have been learning how to manage holiday seasons when on my own – a bit of a mixed experience – I actually like time on my own – good for recharging, great for reading, which is one of my passions, it gives me time for drawing and is a necessary balance to the social busyness of my work and volunteering.  But I find it is a bit tricky to get the balance right and I have had one or two wobbly Saturday nights when I would really rather of had some company. 

I have had heartaches too in my professional life – real blue days.  Back in March, I had one of those horrible times that so many of us face of a total loss of confidence – when you are independent there can be times when you don’t win contracts, when you don’t just feel rejected, but are rejected and even when you have been freelance for 18 years as I have, it doesn’t make it any less challenging to deal with.  I had a very long and tearful phone call one wet Wednesday with my closest friend before I moved into a more sea-green state.

Towards the end of the year, I made a poor decision and ended up letting down a client.  Definitely a low and very blue moment.

And there have been other times of hope, fulfillment and great contentment – a great times introducing groups to Sketchnoting in both Manchester and London, reading student reflective blogs on their learning from a programme, hosting CakeCamp evenings, co-leading a session at NAP with Mike Shaw, lots and lots of fabulous live music – jazz of course, but also being swept away at a performance of Tosca, drawing a picture of my father that actually looks like him!  

When your life is busy, sometimes you don’t have a sense of the whole picture, what the pattern is.   It rushes by and all of a sudden it’s the near the end of the year and it seems a blur – all of a murkiness.
  

But when you pause.  When you step back.  When you seek out and sense the pattern, then you can see the whole picture.

And now that I have paused, I see that this year has been full of golden moments and days as well.  Sitting outside and eating our first meal in the garden in the sun – not realizing then that this year it would be the first of many.   Visiting Delphi with Sam – breathing in the scent of oregano on a sunny hillside.  Conversations in the course of a piece of research.   Working with Gem Dale and a whole team of folk to put on a conference on flexible working.   Trying out so many new things but particularly starting flamenco classes.  Cutting back a shrub on a very cold day in February and the beautiful blue hibiscus flowers that resulted in July.  Cricket on a super hot day with friends. And more.

(Blue hibiscus)

And what stands out is that it was the people who made this year – students, clients, volunteers, co-workers, new friends to draw with, family, my closest friend and Sam. The people who see you through the heartache, who you share hopes with and dream dreams with and celebrate every small win with.  It’s the people who make the year.  Thank you.

Rachel Burnham

Sleep slips through my fingers - Day 29

Day 29 (Friday 29th December 2017)

25 the High Street, Canterbury is the address of the Eastbridge Hospital.
It was built in 1180 to accommodate the increasing numbers of pilgrims
wishing to visit the tomb of Saint Thomas Becket. Becket was martyred
on 29th December 1170 in Canterbury Cathedral (the above picture is
a 15th century alabaster altarpiece from Elham Church, Kent, UK showing
the 4 knights of the royal household who assassinated him). In the
12th century a hospital was a place that provided hospitality (as opposed
to simply a place to treat the sick and injured). For the past 400 years
Eastbridge has provided (and still provides) a home for eight elderly
individuals known as Indwellers. 

I'm back from my flying visit to Somerset - hospitals visits done and I have brought my mother and sister up to London for a few days. It will be good for all of us to spend some time together doing family stuff that is different from our conventional day-to-day existence. I am toying with a trip either to the Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace - it has an exhibition on relating to Charles II and it is small enough not to be exhausting, or else perhaps the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Natural History Museum.

Today's post is by Rachel Burnham, a learning and development consultant based near Manchester. Rachel works with trainers, L&D professionals and HR teams to help them modernise their approaches and become more effective. Rachel is highly creative. The delightful drawing of Rachel and the selkie was done by Rachel herself. Rachel is a talented lady. She writes an excellent L&D focused blog - L & D Matters and is active on social media (you can follow her on Twitter via @BurnhamLandD). When not drawing selkies, Rachel enjoys spending time with her family and is a keen jazz fan, as well as having a passion for gardening (as below illustrates). 

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I love the night-time.  I love the darkness of it.  Night time in Manchester is all lights and noise and sparkle at this time of year.  But I like the dark. And looking up at the stars.

When I go to bed, I like to turn the lights down low and for the room to become a quiet and dark place.  A place of imagination.  As I ready myself for sleep, I imagine the night sky and feel it wrapping all around us and our little world, like a cloak.  A cloak, warm and enfolding.  

A cloak with a big, deep hood, a long and swirling cape, made of deep, dark blue velvet. Midnight blue. 

During the day, I never wear blue, but at night, I dream I am wrapped in a cloak of midnight blue velvet as I sleep. 

Or I imagine my bed, with its wooden frame and warm and cosy quilt, slipping free of its moorings and drifting out through the open window, across the roof tops, sailing amongst the clouds, dallying with the stars, adrift across the mountain tops or with the sea far below, perhaps an island or two, floating round a lighthouse,  whales, porpoises lift out of the waves and return with a silent splash, selkie seals with big eyes retrieve their skins from under rocks and swim through the night and birds large and small flock all around. 

The truth is that though I go off to sleep well enough, these days I rarely make it through the night undisturbed.  This past year I wake at 3.30 and 5 and whereas I used to turn and dive back into deep dreams, now I am often awake and unable to sleep.

I try everything.  I cut out tea and coffee after 6pm and for a glorious three week period in April, I sleep the full night through. But in May, I start to wake again.

I try deep breathing.  I read.   I write poetry.  Sometimes I work. I read some more.   Sometimes a snack helps.   Sometimes I slip off as I read.   I plant imaginary gardens – this is the best kind of gardening – no sore knees or back – I picture a walled garden with pinky-red bricked walls, a large lawn and a coloured-themed border fronted with box, which fortunately I trim only in my mind’s eye!   From the door where we enter the path goes straight-ahead and the border on your left gradually moves from white flowers, through lemon-yellow, to deeper butter yellow, then to full sunshine yellow, with a hint of pale-blue, deepening to full blues as the border ends.   Whilst if you turn to the right, starting again with pure white flowers, the blossoms deepen through cream, tan, soft orange, to tangerine, scarlet, wine red, and deep purples.  I plan a spring planting, begin the summer bedding, but rarely make it into autumn!

Yet even this sometimes fails to lull me to sleep, so I read again.   Or remembering a book, often read to my son when small, where an older brother rabbit told his younger sister rabbit to think of happy things before she went to sleep, I fix my mind and think of happy thoughts.  And think of friendship.

I realise now that it is only this year that I have begun to really value friendship.  How wonderful and precious it is.   Of course, I have had friends before.   And some have stayed and some I have lost along the way.  But until this year, I don’t really think that I have fully appreciated friendship.

I am such an introvert that I need and like lots of time on my own.  And I have always spent so much time surrounded by family, that until now, I never seemed to have room or feel the want of more than a few friends.  But these last few years everything has changed so much for me, that now I want and enjoy the company of many, many friends.

Friendship is such a varied and elastic term.  There are friends and there are friends.   There are acquaintances and colleagues and social media connections, people met through work and joyfully some of these turn into and grow into fully fledged friendships.

This year I have been blessed with my friendships.  There are friends who supported my through some bad times – who listened and were there.  There are friendships developed through collaborative learning projects.  There are friends who I have discussed ideas and who’ve challenged my thinking – in person and at a distance.  There are friends who I have giggled with.  There’s a practical friend who willingly gave up her lunch time to help me stick things up on walls.  There are friends with whom together we have made things happen.  There are friendships which have come into being through volunteering & campaigning together.   And there is a particular friendship which has been all of these things and so much more – a many-faceted friendship of work, learning, jazz and cricket. I feel nurtured by this wealth of friendship and give thanks for it.

And as I think on friendship, I feel that warming, welcome heaviness filling my limbs and a gradual drowsiness, so as dawn comes, I at last slip away to sleep again for an hour or so.  A good morning is here!

Rachel Burnham

9 December 2017

For when your heart feels hollow

Day 35 (Wednesday 4th January 2017)

35 - the age at which Ronnie Corbett met Ronnie Barker, he was 36
(they first became acquainted when they were asked to work together
on the Frost Report). It was after they successfully ad-lib-ed for
nearly 10 minutes, during a technical breakdown, when they were
presenting at the BAFTAs in 1970, where the BBC1 controller
was present, that they were given the opportunity to host
The Two Ronnies. Ronnie Corbett was a bee keeper - another
role in which timing is important. He died 31 March 2016.

Today is my Silver wedding anniversary. It was 25 years ago that I walked down the aisle of Temple Round Church on my father's arm and I commenced married life. I now have 2 wonderful sons, and their father and I will be celebrating with them tonight.

Today's post is by Rachel Burnham the much respected Learning and Development (L&D) specialist, based in Manchester. Did you know that she is a public policy advisor for the CIPD? However, her "day job" is providing learning support and individual development through her business, Burnham L&D. Rachel genuinely cares about the people she works with and enjoys seeing them thrive and grow as well as providing advice and support to L&D professionals to help them become even better at their roles. She really values her own personal learning network too. She writes an excellent L&D focused blog - L & D Matters and is active on social media (you can follow her on Twitter via @BurnhamLandD). 

Outside work she enjoys spending time with her family and is a keen jazz fan, as well as having a passion for gardening. I don't need to tell you much about Rachel, as the marvellous list she has produced within her post will inform you far better than I evert could. She is a wonderful and inspirational woman.

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For when your heart feels hollow

When Kate announced that the theme for this year’s Advent Blog series was ‘Heights, hearts and hollows’, it seemed as though those three words summed up my year. 

The first 6 months of 2016 were full of heights.  Then in mid-summer a close friendship went wrong and despite my best efforts I haven’t been able to put things right.  So, the second half of the year has left me with a hollow heart.  

As I have written before, many years ago my son was born prematurely at 28 weeks.  He weighed 1lb 13oz and spent the first three months of his life in hospital – firstly in intensive care and then in special baby care.  We visited him twice a day in the hospital.  We were so excited to finally bring him home. 

Then began the most challenging time of my life – and the most socially isolating.  Because of the weakness in his lungs, we were advised not to mix with anyone who had any contact with other children.  Just about everyone we knew had children or worked with children and young people – I had a background in youth work and we both volunteered as children’s workers.  We couldn’t take him out for more than an hour.  I had had him so early that I hadn’t even started baby classes.  This was of course pre-internet, pre-social media, pre-Twitter.  I felt so at sea.  So lost.

Arthur Rackham illustration of Danae and her son Perseus

Apart from the loving support of immediate family, one thing really helped me through this time.  From a most surprising source.  I read an article by Julie Burchill (I think) which suggested looking for small things to enjoy every day – it must have been an early piece on positive psychology.  So that is what I started to do. 

It was the middle of winter.  In north London. I couldn’t go on the tube.  We had no money for cafes (don’t get me started on maternity pay and premature births!).  So, I used to go out everyday for a walk with our new baby in the pram – the maximum hour permitted – and I would look out for small things to enjoy.

This is when I really started to appreciate other people’s front gardens.  A winter shrub here, a glimpse of an early snowdrop there, hoar frost on the grass and fallen leaves, a scrap of winter blue sky and just how wonderful tree bark can be!

So for 2017 I will be back to appreciating small things every day.  Here are some of the things I will be looking forward to:

·      Homemade soups – filling the house with warm smells, probably including dumplings.

·      The scent of lemon – I may be making lemon curd.

·      Splashing in puddles – you may need to tap into your inner 8 year old for some of these – I find my inner 8 year old is never far from the surface!  This is a good all year round standby activity – particularly if you live in Manchester.

·      Lighting candles.

El Greco - A Boy Blowing on an Ember to Light a Candle 

·      Growing and picking sweet peas – for the strongest plants you can get sowing these indoors anytime from now on until March.  Apart from the scent, one of the best things about sweet peas is that the more you pick, the more you get.

·      Chatting with neighbours – particularly the ones I don’t yet know so well.

·      Decorating eggs at Easter.  Trundling them down a hill.

·      Thanking someone.

·      Watching waves crash on a beach – my favourite beach is the appropriately named ‘Farr Beach’ as it is right on the north coast of Scotland near Bettyhill – it is also right by a bee sanctuary, which is a great place on a sunny day for spotting all the many different kinds of bees.  Which leads me on to…

·      Growing more bee-friendly plants – I have just widened the borders in my garden to make room for more plants – I’m in the process of getting rid of my lawn entirely – so now I can plant more plants to attract bees.

·      Learning a language – try Duolingo – I’m having fun learning Greek – I’m finding it immensely challenging and enjoying it all the more for that.

·      Taking breaks in my working day to dance enthusiastically – my current favourite track for this is ‘Afro-Blue’ by Cecilia Stalin.  This is also good for your back as well as your spirits.

·      Making home-made birthday cards – some drawing may be involved.

·      Getting in touch again with someone I used to know.

· Going to hear live music – already looking forward to the Manchester Jazz Festival 28^th July to 6^th August.

·      Reading a great book and passing it on to a friend.

Getting pollen on my nose, from getting too close to a lily when sniffing its scent.

·      Keeping in contact with an older relative or family friend who is on their own.

·      Trying out new paints or pencils and enjoying making a mess.

·      Having a picnic, possibly in the rain, though this is only likely, not compulsory.

·      Learning all the words to a song with a challenging lyric – I think this may be my year for mastering ‘The Waters of March’ – though not in the original Brazilian.

·      Picking blackberries.  And eating them!

·      Speaking up for a cause I believe in.

·      Stomping on crisp autumn leaves.

·    Enjoying the sound of rain falling, when you are warm and cosy inside.

·      Cooking something new & different.

·      Walking in woods frequently.

·      And not forgetting enjoying beautiful tree bark.

 The winter my son was born had a happy ending.  One late February afternoon, as the light faded outside, I sat holding him after a feed.  I held him close, felt his warmth and nuzzled his clean baby hair and felt that all was right with the world.   And now, of course, he is 21 and happy, healthy and taller than me.

Where our stories for 2017 will go, we don’t know.  We can’t control all the big stuff that may or may not happen.  We can enjoy the many small moments along the way.