Welsh Art

In the wonderful weird world of Twitter, you can find yourself meeting new people in rather random ways, and discovering new friends and useful contacts. Recently someone started following me and I went to see who this new follower was, as it didn’t appear to be one of the delightful spammers you often find on Twitter! It turned out to be Chris Chalk, a very talented local artist, with a website full of lovely paintings I was really taken with his paintings – mainly beautiful landscapes from around this area of Wales so I kept looking at them and thinking how lovely they were … until I decided to buy one (well, a print of one).

I chose this one, called “Dolgoch landscape, Cambrian mountains”:

Dolgoch landscape, Cambrian mountains by Chris Chalk
(photo from Chris' website)

This painting appealed to me in a couple of ways – firstly it just reminds me of how much I like going for walks in the hills, despite the fact that I so rarely go walking these days. When I used to go for walks more I would often stop to take a picture at a point like this where the path went on ahead, and a new vista opened up. The other reason it appeals is the feeling it gives me. I used to be a bit cynical about people talking about “how does the painting make you feel?” … the kind of art I liked was art that looked like the real thing – the more realistic the more impressed I was – it wasn’t about feelings. But looking at this I feel hopeful, and it makes me think about reaching a point in life where you have to choose whether to step through the gate and through the field into the unknown, or turn back and stick to the safety of places you know. And stepping through looks like a good thing, a hopeful, happy thing. So it makes me feel good looking at it.

Explaining all that makes me feel a bit daft. Hope you don’t think I’m a bit odd, dear reader. But there you go – this is how I feel. And this is why I bought this print, and wished I could buy the real thing.

Here’s my print – I don’t know where it’s going to go yet, so it’s just propped up in the kitchen at the moment, still in it’s plastic wrapping to keep it nice. Thank you Chris for painting a lovely picture, and for the fast professional service

Walking Update

So it’s the end of week 2 of Walk the World and the grand total so far is … 28,205. Last week I got as far as 13,236, so that means that I did 14,969 steps this week. So, better than last week, but not brilliant compared with others. But comparing yourself with others is not the wisest thing to do in such circumstances … so I shall just be pleased that I have walked a bit more than last week In a burst of mathematicalness, I have calculated that this week was a 13% increase on last week, so that is good. Mainly any good amounts of steps are achieved at weekends – there is not much opportunity for getting more steps in during the week. People who walk to work get far more steps in, and perhaps there are people with jobs that involve a lot more walking about. I can’t walk to work as I live too far away, and my job mainly involves sitting at the computer with occasional jaunts across campus to go to meetings or train people. So unless I spend every lunch hour walking, there’s not much hope for huge numbers of steps … and I can’t really spend every lunch break wandering off when there’s lots of other stuff to do like catching up on shopping, actually eating lunch and stuff.

Walking for a Week

I’ve been doing the Walk the World Challenge with work for a week now so I thought I’d update you on how it’s going. Not that great it would seem, in comparison with others who are doing it. I’ve done 13236 steps which apparently equates to 6.618 miles. Not even far enough to get from work to home yet! I am number 163 in the league table I’m not sure whether I’m so low down purely because I am not walking as much as others or if there are issues with the pedometers … I have heard people saying that theirs seem to register more steps than they actually do, but mine seems fairly accurate. Anyway, I’m finding it quite interesting, and I might see if I can make my weeks’ total a bit bigger next week, if I can actually find the time and energy to do more walking.