Enjoying the Strange Life of Lock Down

 

Enjoying the Strange Life of Lock Down. View above Patching village, West Sussex

A little late starting to fill in my diary for today, that is because the day has been full to overflowing with action so far. We covered another new run route today as the download from the Garmin Forerunner shows. There are a myriad of lanes, bridle paths and foot paths and for that matter, animal tracks if we are in need of a change, when enjoying Angmering Park Estate that runs from the A27 main road, north, east and west bumping into the South Downs that are equally lovely but open hills with stunning longer views.

Today we ran mainly in the woods and only came out into the open when we reached the village of Patching, where we used to live. In the picture here you are looking south east with the spire of Patching church just beyond the field of Rapeseed that has settled into the UK, much to the chagrin of some, who refer to it as The Yellow Peril because it flies, and grows everywhere now. Brassica Napus is one of the mustard family I believe. Just behind the church spire, we can see the sea, the English Channel and if it was a clear day you would also see the Rampion Wind farm out there. That is another Marmite feature of our landscape. I love to look at the wind farm but then others think it is an abomination… how can that be when you think about how beneficial wind farms are to our world. Anyway it’s a pretty view isn’t it.

When Steve did the above download, we were both pleased that it showed that we had run 28 ½ miles in the last seven days, which is a big improvement for us. The numbers on the download picture are kilometres and it would have shown 13 km, if Steve had not stopped it when we reached 8 miles, since that was the planned run for today. We walked out the rest of the path back to the car. It was another day with hardly any animals so that was the only disappointment, only one little deer and a couple of rabbits but lots of birds but nothing exciting.

The only surprise of the run was a few minutes after Steve had taken that photo, after we had crossed the rape field and run through the farm and out by the church, as soon as we were on France Lane, in the village of Poling, we were both a little taken aback to see a life size cardboard cut out of Boris Johnson standing by the front door of one of the pretty cottages. We were not expecting the Prime Minister to confront us out in a West Sussex village even though it was a quite flattering image of him considering that he seems to have put on weight since he has been PM. That is not so surprising though, since he used to ride his bike and do a bit of running as we saw in the press before he burst into the most important office in the land.

After our run, we took a cheeky detour into Arundel and drove a lap of the picturesque town adding a couple of miles onto out drive home, our first visit in over two months. Once indoors we had coffee and them changed into something comfortable and fresh for a one hour session of Qigong. Again there were some positions that were held for 3-5 minutes; what pleasure it is to untie yourself from those, especially the one that was called something like root legs, where our formally less supple legs are tied into a tree root like twined shape. It’s quite surprising how quickly the body loosens up, with daily repetition. I used to do yoga when I was a teenager but have not done much of that for years. Then after a tea break it was time for our Ballet Workout with the New York City Ballet. Again lots of floor exercises as well as pliés (I hope Spell Check won’t change that to pliers, which is what Steve calls them) and some gentle dance movements.

Above Berchtesgarten

Having taken a bath, we sat down to watch something Steve had found of You Tube. This time it was a travel programme from the air. It was part of a series called I think ‘The world Above’ and this one was in Bavaria and was interesting to us since we had been to a good half of the places shown, Germany from Above. 

There were a collection of Castles and hilltop abbeys. Baden-Baden, Neues Schloss Chiemsee, built on the largest Island in the Chiemsee. Schloss Linderhoff that is absolutely fabulous inside and out, then Neue Schwanstein that is just fairy tale. 

There was Ulm, where we have stayed many times, with the Minster in the centre of the town and has the highest spire in the world the voice over said, could that be possible we wondered? We have walked all around it but not noted the height ourselves. 

We have taken a holiday in Oberammergau and seen the passion play; it takes all day, and is quite and experience, we bought some little wood carvings that we have in our living room as a reminder of the stay there. We don’t usually watch TV in the middle of the day but enjoyed that so much because we had been to so many places of the shown and thought it lucky that Steve spotted it when trolling through looking for something else entirely.