The Second Challenge

Do the Blackpool Half Marathon

Ow Ow Ow Ow Ow
How is it possible for my legs to HURT this much.
I have some shiny new running shoes. I have drawn up a list of runs that I have to do between now and April 5th to get myself gradually fit, breaking myself in gently and building up so that when it happens I'll be ready for it, starting with just two miles - two miles that's all, on the flat. And I cycle eight miles every day and do Aikido so I shoudl be pretty fit you'd think.
Basically this challenge means that my legs are going to hurt from now until mid-April.
I did two miles, round Chorlton Park. It's a lovely park - full of old trees and wood carvings, football pitches which were busy and a kids playground which was empty so I went all Rocky and tried to do some monkey crunches (or GI Jane sit ups as Em calls them) ha ha ha. Basically by hanging off the bars with my knees and one arm and tightening what I think are my stomach muscles I managed to convince myself that I was doing something - making a fool of myself I suspect.
That was on Saturday. Then my legs hurt on Sunday, and worse on Monday, and stopped briefly after acrobalance but then started again on Tuesday and still hurt now.
This week I have to do a two mile and a three mile run.
It is Wednesday and I haven't done either yet.
I did go to singing last night - I was in the middles again and the lady next to me kept telling me that I was singing the wrong bit and putting her finger nearest me in her ear - to block me out maybe? Simon who runs it has invited me to a family party on Saturday - presumably to get me on my own so that he can gently break it to me that when they said it didn't matter what your singing voice was like they didn't MEAN it. So maybe I won't go, then I can carry on singing, oblivious. We did 'The Truth Hits Everybody', and 'Won't you Come Home Bill Bailey' - theme seemed to be songs with more words in them than notes.

Community 3: Losing the Plot

I found a community allotment called 'The Lost Plot' on the 'Action For Sustainable Living' website. They're in Chorlton and I thought what better way to find community and maybe get some free veg into the bargain. They said they were there every Sunday so the week before last I wandered over in search of the lost plot......
I could see it through the high spiky pallisade fencing surrounding the allotments and recognised it from the photos on the website but there was no one there. I shouted to a woman in a wooley hat who was on the next plot and she said she'd never heard of the lost plot but let me in so that I could have an ask around. It's a massive site and has central compost heaps where I found several hairy gardeners with wheelbarrows. They hadn't heard of the lost plot either but at the words 'community allotment' said 'Arrrhhhh,' in the manner of a Bristolian Pirate who's spent a lot of years in Yorkshire, 'You'll be meaning the TOIMEWASTERS!' and fell about chortling through their beards before pointing back to the way I'd come saying 'it's in the corner - the one with all the TOILETS' and went back to laughing.
I wandered back and the lady who had let me in said that she did know Josh and Helen who run it but didn't know it as the Lost Plot. I mooched around, took some photos of the cob oven and the toilets and went to fly my kite.
The next week I emailed them and got an enthusiastic reply from Helen so I took a break from homework on Sunday afternoon to try again. They were there this time with two more allotmenters - Clair and ermmm...bloke with a blue coat. All very nice. I helped out moving some clay (left over from the oven building) and clearing an area for a polytunnel they've got coming and took a wheelbarrow of weeds to the compost area. They all seemed very nice and I shall definitely be going back but not this Sunday as it's Chinese New Year.
On Monday the spokes http://www.ibikemcr.org.uk/spokes.htm reconvened after the christmas break for the first acrobalance session. I had two major breakthroughs - a split second of actually balancing on my hands in a handstand - I mean I actually felt that I was actually balanced for the first time ever, and after weeks of Owen telling us to isolate the part of our body we were trying to spin the hula hoop around I did - and it worked! (I should try this listening thing more often). Also we discovered that J-Dog can actually get up on my shoulders really easily but that we're still all really rubbish at rock and roll dancing.

Community 2: My Birthday

I got my first birthday wishes, on-line at ten past twelve from Phil who I haven’t seen for nearly a decade, since he and Bridget departed, with monstrous hangovers, for New Zealand. We’d even lost touch completely until last year. Phil was a housemate and very much part of my community when I was at College and I classed him as my ‘best’ friend for a lot of years so having him back in touch makes me very happy, although the distance makes me sad. I had a barrage of other happy birthdays on facebook from Dubai and Portugal as well as closer to home, from people I haven’t seen in years to people I see regularly.
I was woken a few hours later by a text message telling me to look under the bed where a present had been left from my friend John who visited at the weekend. John lives in Machynlleth in Wales where I am an occasional part of another incredible community – the environmentalist fancy dress party animals, activists, thinkers and adventurers that surround the Centre for Alternative Technology. The present was a book, ‘Critical Mass, Bicycling’s Defiant Celebration’ a beautiful collection of essays from critical massers all over the world and a reminder that here is another amazing community of which I am a part.
All in all the day reminded me of the scale of the word community – it’s not just our street or our town or our immediate circle of friends but everyone, everywhere. I spent my birthday evening finishing putting a presentation together on sustainable communities, why we need them and what they are. I’m not that angelic – I’d promised to do it about eight months ago and suddenly realised it was this Thursday, last minute as always. I just hope no one challenges me to start doing things as soon as I realise they need doing – it would be impossible. I’d been struggling for a closing statement but I went with this:
‘And finally - all of us have our own areas of specialisation and it’s very easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. Sustainable communities are not just about sensible energy use but also about water, waste and resources and also the opportunities they offer the people who live and work in them.
And of course they are not just about the way they are designed and built but also the way they are inhabited and used and how they interact with the already existing communities surrounding them, including the global community.
And all of us are a part of that.
And all of us have a duty to contribute to that.’
It was beautiful, honest. If they hadn’t been a bunch of hard-nosed engineers I swear they would have cried.
Happy Birthday to me. Thank you everyone for your love.
Right – back to my homework, only another 1000 words to write. It’s due in Tuesday and I’ve only had it since November.

Community 1: The Chorlton Sing

Last Tuesday, and this, I have been attending ‘The Chorlton Sing’ which is a community choir and meets at an upstairs room in the Lloyds hotel, handily located minutes from my flat.
It’s run by Simon, a man too tall for his jeans who unloaded his keyboard from the car and put out chairs in a manic fashion whilst explaining that everyone comes late, that people probably won’t come on the first one back and that they’re a sort of ‘Radio 2’ singing group rather than ‘that sort of gospel African group’. I smiled and nodded and drank my wine but it didn’t mean much as I’ve never been to a singing group before unless you count a singing workshop at a festival which was spine-tinglingly beautiful (but given the money we’d all paid to feel that way it should have been).
I said as much but Simon said ‘oh if your voice doesn’t have a ceiling just sit with the sopranos, otherwise just sit anywhere’. Well my voice does have a ceiling (a low one) and a floor (high) and walls (narrow) and a bloody great lumpy object in the middle so I sort of veer between low and high, missing the middle, loudly bellowing and school assembly quiet and crisply pronounced and pub-singer slurred in an unpredictable manner that even takes me unawares.
The group is around thirty voices, about fifteen turned up both last week and this despite Simon’s fears of post-christmas laziness. He manages the group with an enthusiasm that reminds me of a music teacher at school gallivanting between his keyboard and the centre of the floor with a tiny banjo, singing all our different parts to us (variously high, middle and low, or high and low or John, Paul and George) with confusing speed. My ears find it especially confusing as, obviously he can sing, because he runs a singing group, and no one else seemed to struggle but a lot of the time he seemed to be singing all the parts in a high falsetto.
Of the other singers there is Dominic – his brother who has a great deal of volume I found tonight when he was stood behind me, Paula with the flicky hair and glittered eyelids who laughed so much in the song ‘Bald Man’ at the line ‘When your dog disrespects you’ that she made me laugh so I tried not to look at her but I knew she was laughing anyway and could see her shoulders juddering from the corner of my eye, Janine who makes a face like a (beautiful) wide mouthed frog when she hits the high notes and some others – that’s as far as I got with names although there was a girl from Toronto and one from Malta.
Last week we did songs I didn’t know and this week we had a Monkees fest with ‘Daydream believer’ and ‘I’m a Believer’ and the ‘Off the Wall’ which Simon said should be jazzy but ended up sounding more ‘Gregorian-chanty’. At the end we stand up and sing all the songs which is the best bit.
I didn’t chat with many of them but there seemed to be a deal of chatting going on in the break and before and after and they’ve been going nearly three years so I think community was definitely in the air. I shall persevere but I suspect that with my singing voice I may well make more friends by leaving than by joining!

And the first challenge is........

‘Find a sense of community’

I like this one as a) It's nice and vague and b) I reckon it’s principally about making friends. The last house I lived in was in a courtyard development that was entirely devoid of all sense of community. The only time I saw my neighbours was when they were scurrying between their houses and cars. I lived there a whole year and only had the following interaction with my neighbours:

· Phil from two doors down looked after a parcel for me once

· Jean opposite once told me she’d been walking in the Norfolk broads

· The guy next door (didn’t give me his name) complained about my music once and gave my friends who had parked their (rather expensive and shiny motor home) on MY drive some abuse.

I wasn’t sorry to leave.

At the other end of the scale I lived in Portugal, up in the mountains where everybody is each other’s soap opera and it was impossible to spend so much as a day there without everyone knowing your name, where you came from and why. It could be a bit overbearing at times but as a model for society it seems much healthier. People only live alone out of choice, older family members are parked by the stove in the kitchen when they lose they marbles rather than farmed out to a nursing home and teenagers tend to behave themselves when out and about as just about everyone knows their Gran, and if they don’t they can expect a thick ear.

The web defines community variously as:

· a group of people living in a particular local area.

· a group of nations having common interests .

· a residential district where people live occupied primarily by private residences.

· a group of interdependent organisms inhabiting the same region & interacting with each other.

Which is all well and good but for me community is defined by the personal involvement of the people, nations or organisms which make it up. I started thinking about what else it means to me, and came up with the following:

· Saying hello to people in the street near where I live and having (at least some of) them say hello back instead of looking at me as if I’m weird.

· Knowing people within walking distance from my home that I can drop in upon unannounced and drink tea with.

· Knowing people who will do the same to me.

· Knowing that if I die in my flat someone will realise before the smell of decay causes my neighbours to call environmental health.

· Feeling that I ‘belong’ somewhere.

I’m very lucky in that I live in Chorlton, in South Manchester, and it does seem to have a fairly vibrant community buzz to it. It’s home to the renowned Unicorn Co-operative Vegan supermarket which always seems to have people chatting as they purchase their locally grown organic veg and lentil-tofu-beancurd cakes. The little shopping centre which revolves around four banks on a crossroads (wittily known as ‘the four banks’) seems unusually thriving and better equipped with independent shops than almost any small town centre I’ve seen, most of which have little bits of paper in the window advertising local events. There’s a plethora of groovy bars and cafes and more delicatessens per square mile than anywhere else in the world (alright I made that up – but I think it is true). One friend refers to it as ‘the muesli belt’. It’s difficult to walk out on a weekend morning without seeing at least five people with a copy of the guardian under their arm, of whom three will be wearing sandals.

What I’m saying is this – if I can find a sense of community anywhere I must be able to find one here.

My question to you is this.......how do you define community, and do you know your neighbours?

The Challenge

Towards the end of last year I started thinking, as one does, about what I had achieved, what I wanted to achieve and generally where I was going in life. The conclusions of this exercise were a bit vague and so this year, rather than indulge in a load of private, secret New Year’s Resolutions which would be broken before I’d even returned to work after the Christmas break I decided to adopt a different strategy, and this is it. I have challenged my friends and family (although, of course, my family count as both of these) to set me some personal challenges for the year ahead. I said they could be open to interpretation or finely defined as they chose. I didn’t nail it down much beyond that as I thought giving them free rein would result in a more interesting response as they stretched their colourful imaginations to the limit – how right I was! (I would like to point out to any of you that are reading this that this is not necessarily meant as a compliment)

However........here we are, and here I am with an upside down hat and lots of pieces of paper with challenges written on and I will be doing my best over the following year to complete as many as possible or at the very least to fail to complete them in an entertaining manner.

I would like to point out that the doors are not closed to new challenges but please send them to me as messages so that they’re a surprise for everyone else if they get pulled out. I reserve the right to alter or omit any that I feel are completely ‘wrong’ but will try my best to display a sense of fair play and also of the ridiculous. And if I don’t you may berate me in the comments box or desert me altogether.

I hope that some of you will join me in my journey this year and take on aspects of my challenges and comment about them and contribute to my efforts with advice and encouragement.

Lets go............