Mr Clipping and why you can't do everything yourself

I'm aware I have a need to do everything myself. I'm the worst kind of impassive control freak. The soles of my feet itch if I have to watch someone do something I'd rather be doing myself. I'm a back seat almost everything. Of course, most of the time I hide it well, butI realise I have to give this up because it really gets in the way of living creatively.

Mr Clipping taught me this lesson last week after I'd spent half a day trying to clip out an image to place on a white background in a proposal. Frustrated, angry at mysellf for not magically being a graphic designer I went online and Mr Clipping offered to do it for me for three quid. He did a really good job. Much better than I'd ever have the skill or patience to do.

While he was doing it I went into the garden, picked some tomatoes and made a salsa. That I can do.

My wordle

Fat bellies mean we don't breathe easily

You know what it's like. You get to middle age, and as much as you swore (in your twenties, obviously, when you could eat and drink what you liked, never sleep and never exercise) that it wouldn't happen to you, you realise that all the trousers you bought three years ago no longer fit, and you're going to have to admit to a bigger number for your waist size the next time you go shopping.

It interests me the strategies we then use to kid ourselves (and others) that we haven't quite given in to the midde aged spread. Clothes styles (tight T-shirts really don't work), the hand distractions (great for when you're stood up presenting to a room-full of people), the 'suck-in'... And of course the more we suck that belly in, the more constricted our lung-space becomes. Belly breathing is right out. We lose touch, in a strange way, with the lower half of our bodies. We increase nerves and anxiety with shallow breathlnessness.

The solution? You've really got to let it all hang out! Fill your chest with air and push that air down into your belly (massaging all of your internal organs on the way) so that you can take in even more. Feel the effect that it has on anxiety. You can literally push stomach and chest nerves out of your body. It's called Zazen - try it!

Okay, so I may get the odd comment about having chunked up a bit, but I can live with that if it enables me to breathe easy.

Let it snow..

School closure outrage! Parents forced to stay at home! Bad weather costs the economy £1.2bn! 

Well, you should have seen the celebrations in our house (the eldest two created a snow worhsip dance to thank the weather gods for their two extra days off school). Sledging in a nearby field, mass snowball fight and snowman building competitions on the village green, hot ribena (spiced wine for the big kids), red faces, chill blains, wet socks and gloves on the radiators... it could almost have been the nineteen seventies again. The only outrage, how outraged so many parents were about having to stay home with the kids.

Grayswood paintings

Acrylic and charcoal on canvas

Courage, mon brave

Have we forgotten how to be brave? Courage is what we need most to face the year (or more) of whatever is ahead of us. Good old fashioned courage. Not the kind of bravery it takes to bungee jump, quad bike or snow board. It's the courage you need to hunker down while the storm thrashes around you.

It's not just that we spent the previous 15 years chasing dreams, money and material possessions, perfect lives, perfect relationships and perfect bodies, it's more that we did everything we could to eradicate risk and uncertainty. We'll do anything to convince ourselves that we're in control. The end of Boom and Bust was a fake claim about a fake life in which there is only pleasure, and no pain. In which change just doesn't happen.

But suddenly here we are... more uncertainty in the Western World than since the the 1940s. Everything we've worked for at risk, change the only constant. So be brave. After all, learning to live with risk, uncertainty and change is really just about accepting life as it really is.

Recession... what recession?

I spent a day in the Victoria area of London just before Christmas, making a film about how people feel about the recession. No loaded questions, but we were looking for doom-laden material to use in a promo film for an online life coaching experience I'm involved in developing. We had to scrap a good deal of it, on the basis that most people were pretty chipper. A far cry from the media-generated picture of a nation in depression.

But our interviewees' responses had a familiar echo to them. Everyone knew someone else who was in trouble or likely to be in trouble because of the downturn. But... 'It's not really going to be a problem for me. My job is stable, it's not likely to be threatened... We'll be okay.' The full cross section from public to private sector, management to staff, men and women, regardless of age... pretty much everyone was going to be ok, it was just that they were worried about someone else who might not be.

It kind of reminded me of those sex surveys, where heterosexual men are apparently having sex twice as often as heterosexual women.

A recession that doesn't actually affect any of us, just some other people we know...