I’ve liked them all, and I’ve learnt different things from each.

But as I nurse a running injury I’m thinking about what I need in order to be able to run without doing as much harm as I do good.

That’s got me onto imagining what I really want my personal trainer to be.

My ideal personal trainer would be someone who:

• Speaks the language of sleep and rest as eloquently as he talks of exertion
• Understands that a woman’s strength waxes and wanes with the moon
• Is as skilled in the fine art of listening to the body as he is in pushing it
• Appreciates that a body in winter has different needs from a body in summer
• Grasps that time spent exercising is time that would otherwise be spent earning money or being with the family and so needs to be kept in balance
• Knows that nothing in nature goes on and on getting better and fitter and stronger…but goes in cycles with seasons of fattening and leaning, of working and resting, of hurting and healing.

Just look in my loft. There are boxes packed with all the pages I have written.

Look on Amazon. You can find my books there.

Look at my home. Apart from gifts, everything I own has been paid for through my hours of labour putting one word in front of the other.

I am a writer – it must be true.

So why is it that all these years (decades), there is nothing that is as hard as writing? All the other things – training adults, filing my accounts, managing a team, teaching children, making websites – none of that is as difficult as the blank page,

the empty brain,

the silent room.

I found the film a little disappointing because so much of it was about the politics and practicalities around women as artists. These are important issues for sure, but they aren’t the questions that I’m asking at the moment.

Friend: Are you coming on the coach-trip to Blackpool?

Me: No.  I didn’t fancy it with Arch. He hates being strapped in a seat. Making him sit still for three hours there and three hours back is something I’d rather avoid.

Friend:  You should just tell him he has to sit still. That’s what I do with my little granddaughter. I could take her on a coach journey anywhere.

Me: So? Ebony is Ebony and Arch is Arch. That’s the difference.

How many times, in the five years since Arch has been born, have I had a variation on that conversation? (“My child does this. Your doesn’t.  Therefore you should change your parenting.”)

The assumption underlying it is that children are pretty much the same so they’ll all respond in a similar way to similar treatment.

But where does that assumption come from? It’s certainly not true of adults.

Some adults needs to sleep for eight  hours a night, others thrive on four.  Some adults are at their best in a creative environment when they can make it up as they go along, other prefer to operate where there are clear rules and procedures. Some adults enjoy getting up early on a cold winter’s morning to run around a rugby pitch (they do honestly), others prefer to sit in bed and watch a film in Italian for the sheer sensuality of the words.

I’m sorry. This is so obvious I’ve embarrassed myself writing it down.

My question is this:  If we accept this is true for adults, why should it be any different for children?

Do I think that parenting has any bearing on the way a child behaves? Yes.

Would children behave in a similar way in the they were all brought up the same? Definitely not – and thank God for that.

You know what they say about criticism and moccasins?  How much more true is it of parents and their gloriously varied offspring?

So that was how I came to be doing something I had not done for five years, ten years, 20 years in some cases – laying my hands upon my treasures…opening them, smelling them, remembering what I had been doing and who I had been when I had drunk deeply of their meanings.

But as I leafed through these layers of self, I was surprised to find strangeness and familiarity in equal measure.

Take The Continental Philosophy Reader, for example.  I remember buying that from a store in London when I was in my 20s.  I recall how excited I was to have it.

Good grief.  It included Claude Levi-Strauss on the Structural Study of Myth, Michel Foucault on The Discourse of Language and Hans-Georg Gadamer on The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem.  Who wouldn’t have been wetting herself?

But as I looked through the fat and juicy tome, I realised that some 20 years on, I didn’t understand a word of it.  What ever was it all about? Did I really read that kind of thing just for the Hell of it? Today I can barely read a newspaper.

Yet in the margins of this inscrutable text, were my annotations showing just how much it had meant to me:  ”YES!!!!” , “Cf mimesis”, “Cf Rubem Alves”, “Yes, yes, yes!” I got it once. I don’t get it now.

All of which caused me to ponder…where did that thinking go? Is it lost, just because I can’t remember it?  Do the things we can’t recall disappear or have they become a part of us, affecting who we are, at some level creating us, even if we can not trace them?

It was never part of my plan to play the organ for funerals, but it just so happened that I became a church organist because I could play the piano and there was a vacancy on the organ stool.

And so it was that playing for funerals became part of the rhythm and texture of my life and has been for the past 20 or so years.

Some funerals are huge standing-room-only affairs – 400 people squashed into the space with not enough orders-of-service to go round and with trouble being heard at the back.  Others are pitifully small and lonely.

Sometimes the person who died is someone who has approached death without fear and who leaves an inspiring legacy to her mourners.

Other times the coffin is shockingly small, carried by a mother and father in unbearably poignant steps.

Some families know exactly how they want the service to be conducted. They are well organised.  I have time to practice and my brief is clear.

Other times – and I enjoy these more, if I’m honest – I’m waiting for the hearses to arrive before I can find out what tune they want to what hymn and what I should do with this rock band that has turned up unannounced and set up in the corner.

But whatever kind of funeral it is – black or white, peaceful or tragic, smooth or veering on the chaotic – I always feel profoundly humbled to be taking part.

What can you say to people who are bereaved?  Not a lot.  Words lose their currency in the rawness of grief.

But music….quietly playing as families hold cold hands and kiss their beloved’s face before the coffin lid is  closed…offering suggestions of amazing grace, hints of heaven’s morning breaking….

I am so honoured. It is one of the best things that I do.

Image @szbrozek

Don’t get me wrong, I love summer evenings – sitting with friends as the barbeque cools and the scents of the impending darkness fill the air, calling the children in from the far ends of the camp site as it approaches ten o’clock, coming home all nice ‘n’ lazy because it’s light and it will stay that way for – oooh – hours and hours. I luxuriate in the ease of summer.

But there’s another side (should I say a shadow side?) to the gloriously long evenings of June.

What about the times when I’m tired or sad and all I want is to get home, have a bath and get into my pyjamas?  It’s just not the same doing that in daylight.

What about the moments when I long to create a womb-like space in which to curl up, light a candle and pray?  I need to do that all the year round but in summer there is often a dissonance between the callings of my inner world and the long, glaring hours of light.

I’m not complaining. One of the many things I enjoy about living in England is its climate and the contrast between its winter nights and summer days.

But as the year is poised on this, the summer solstice, I salute and welcome the start of the hemisphere’s descent into darkness,  just as, in six months’ time, I will welcome its ascent into light.

Image @ Jean Carneiro

“Now darling,” I said.  ”There’s something you need to learn and it’s very important.

“When somebody gives you a present, you must say: ‘Thank you very much’ whatever you think of it.  Even if you don’t like it, even if you’ve already got it, remember the people who gave it to you have been thoughtful and kind – so thank them.”

I had no faith in Arch’s ability to learn this lesson so, at his party, I was in full-control mode whisking presents out of his hand to avert social calamities. “We’re having far too much fun to open them now, aren’t we?”

The crunch came a few days later when friends dropped by with a late present for Arch and we had no reason (pretend or otherwise) not to open it there and then in front of them.

Arch eagerly tore at the wrappings. It was Mr Men pants. I curled my toes – too young for him, not his thing, nothing he could play with…. What was Arch going to say?

“Thank you very much,” he said,  confidently looking my friends in the eye.

Afterwards I sat Arch on my knee and told him how proud I was of what he had done.

“Yes,” he said. “I thought I was going to like the present – but I didn’t. It was boring.”

“It was,” I said, “but you learnt something very important about not hurting people’s feelings.  I’m really proud of you darling. Well done.”

But as I said the words, I felt my heart contract.

If what Arch has learnt was so good and useful – why had it made me sad?

* Image @ uglyhero

And I had done plenty of anticipating being a mum. I first started longing for a child when I was in my early 20s. The dream wasn’t fulfiled until I was in my early 40s, so there was plenty of time to yearn and imagine how it might be.

The biggest surprise for me has been the discovery that having a baby hasn’t completely dealt with that part of me that…wants a baby.  Five years on, I still want to be pregnant, to give birth and to breastfeed. That desire is more of a still small voice than the womb-wrenching scream that it was in my childless days, but it is there nonetheless.

“Have another one,” is my first response on observing this but  – even if I could – I’m not sure that’s the solution. I’m guessing that even if I had five or six, I’d still end up grey-haired, saggy-bellied and wanting a baby.

As I already have a child, I’m wondering if the desire that remains is best not taken literally. Perhaps I should welcome it as primal, as archetypal.   I wonder what would happen if, instead of feeling saddened that my baby-days are over, I embraced my desire as a metaphor to live by and found other ways of conceiving, bearing, giving birth.

This is a new thought. It’s very much in embryo but I shall wait as it implants and see what grows.

A 5km run is said to be for families and beginners. But despite years of working out at the gym, I would feel defeated after running little more than half that distance. “How do other people do it?” I wondered. “I can’t carry on any more…”

That was until last Saturday, when it was such a glorious spring morning I decided that instead of working out in the gym, I’d go for a jog around Kings Heath Park.

I had already found out that a figure of eight in Kings Heath Park is 2km, so I decided to do one and a half circuits and call that my workout for the day.

I started off. The frost on the grass was glistening like pearls in the low-morning sunshine. The bare trees stood in sculptural silouettes against the clear blue sky.   Tiny varieties of daffodils and snowdrops were peeping shyly from the earth.  The birds were calling to each other, reminding me of other dawns I had witnessed, other times when I am overwhelmed by the sheer sensuality of being alive. I completed one lap.

On the second circuit, replete with voluptousness, I decided to pray. I remembered a baby I knew who was in hospital, for one loop of the eight.  I thought about the people of Japan, for the second.  Every time I glanced at the roofs of the Kings Heath terraced houses, I would think of the people who lived in them, whose names I didn’t know but whose neighbourhood I shared.

“I’ve just run 4km,” I realised as I finished the lap.  “How come I couldn’t run 4km on a treadmill? Isn’t that a great example of the connection between body and spirit? Doesn’t that just show the fallacy of thinking of the body as a fixed, physical entity?”

And with that, I thought I may as well do another 2km circuit – and I did.