Category: Writing

Health and fitness, Thoughts, Writing

Hobbies I’ve Tried Over The Years

minceandskirlie

Over the years I have tried a LOT of hobbies. Despite being a bit introverted, I really enjoy trying new things and learning new skills. There is quite probably a neurodivergent reason for a lot of this, but getting diagnosed as an adult is a bit of a non-starter round here. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all. I thought it would be interesting to go through a list of as many of them as I could remember, from when I was at school to where I am now as an adult in his mid-forties.

Anyway, many of these haven’t stuck with me, but a few I’ve carried on over the years or picked up again after some long gaps. My main takeaway is never be afraid to try new things, everyone was a beginner sometime and the vast majority of hobby communities and clubs (online and in real life) are very welcoming and encouraging to newcomers.

In no particular order:

  • Football – never progressed past kickabouts with friends really and going to watch a couple of games per season at Pittodrie.
  • Video games – a constant throughout my life, from the spectrum to the PS5. I really can’t imagine never being a gamer.
  • Warhammer – Started with 40k 2nd edition box set in early 90s. Then picked it up again a few years ago and now have a lot of plastic lying around in various painted states.
  • Guitar – another constant since I started at 14. Sometimes I go through spells of not playing much, but always pick up a guitar again eventually. I enjoy the variety it offers, from playing heavy metal bangers, to fingerpicking folk songs on my acoustic, to bluesy jams, and even picking up some jazz recently.
  • ITF Taekwondo – did this for about 6 or 7 years on and off until a bad injury. Still really miss it but don’t think my back would forgive me if I tried martial arts again.
  • WTF Taekwondo – went to a couple of classes at uni but didn’t gel with it
  • Hung Ga Kung Fu – did it for a year or so in between TKD spells
  • Airfix model airplane kits – built a few as a kid and picked up a few recently as an adult
  • Golf – I still have clubs but have always been pretty awful at it
  • Badminton – Played a bit at school, was rubbish at it.
  • Drawing – Made a half hearted effort to improve at this a few years ago. Can only sometimes produce something I’m happy with.
  • Juggling – I was given some juggling boobs as a leaving gift from a previous workplace, so felt obliged to learn.
  • Playing in bands – From the age of 18 to my early 30s this was a big part of my life. Hopefully I can revisit it again someday.
  • Mandolin -Picked it up when I got into some trad music and still enjoy picking away at it regularly.
  • Piano – Have tried learning a few times over the years
  • Photography -Got a nice camera when our eldest was born and really got into it for a while
  • D&D – A few sessions as a kid and then played with a regular group again for the last few years
  • Cycling – Always had a bike, but took it seriously for a while when I got a road bike over a decade ago. Still ride it!
  • Indoor climbing – Tried this before the kids were born as something we could do together. I still go back to try it every few months. I’ve never progressed past the easiest grades.
  • Going to the gym – Was a regular gym user for a while when I had easy access through work.
  • Running – I started this about 20 years ago when someone asked me if I wanted to a 10k for charity. Has been the one exercise I’ve seriously committed to long term and still do today.
  • Hill running – Joined a club for a few years and even ran up some munros with them. Great fun and miss being that fit!
  • Hill walking – Haven’t been out on the hills for a few years now due to injuries but really miss being out there. This is one I’ll definitely get back to some day.
  • Swimming – Took this quite seriously for a few months, trying to improve my technique to maybe see if I could enter a very short triathlon. Could never get much past the barely drowning stage.
  • Birdwatching – Always loved birds since I was a kid and really started getting back into IDing them a few years ago. As simple as just figuring out what was in the garden really.
  • Environmental Science – Been doing this degree for 7 years with the OU in my spare time.
  • Tinkering with electronics – Built a couple of effects pedal kits, have a load of raspberrypi and arduino kits. Haven’t ever done much with them.
  • Programming – I started getting BASIC coding books out of the library as soon as I could read. Kept it up over the years and was even a developer professionally for a while. Hardly touch code now.
  • Web design – Learned HTML, Javascript and PHP in the late 90s and 2000s. Again, was useful in a work setting for a while too but not anymore.
  • Magic The Gathering – Got into this a couple of years ago and now have way to many boxes of cardboard in the house.
  • Fishing – Bought a cheap rod and a load of tackle. Lost most of it to seaweed without catching anything.
  • Archery – After the last olympics I wanted to try something new while getting over my back injury. This fit the bill and I’m still really enjoying going along to our club sessions every week.
  • Racing and flight sims – Yes I do need a racing wheel rig and a HOTAS setup to play my very serious video games. No I’m not any good at them.
  • Singing – Oh god I’m so bad, but I keep trying.
  • Rubiks cube – My daughter got really into these a couple of years ago and so I got her to teach me and we had a few months of trying to beat each other’s times. She won.
  • Linocut printing – Bought a small kit on a total whim and loved the result I was able to get with my very basic drawing skill.
  • Cooking – Don’t do this as seriously as I used to, but this blog started as a foodie site. Sharing recipes and restaurants. For a while I was really proud of how good the food I could make was.
  • Writing prose and poetry – Again, I took this very seriously for a long time. Was part of a local writers group and even got a few pieces published locally. Kind of lost the enthusiasm for it over the pandemic lockdowns.
  • Lockpicking – This is a recent one. I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole and found a kit with some picks and a couple of practice locks for not a lot of money. It’s surprisingly simple!
  • Homebrewing beer – Great if you like your beer extra yeasty flavoured. Did a few batches and realised my time was better spent buying good beer from people who knew what they were doing.
  • Learning French – One day I’ll actually do this properly.
  • Twitch streaming – This was interesting and I do want to go back to it. As someone who has, er, a few hobbies but doesn’t necessarily have anyone that shares my varied interests, it was nice to be able to just turn the stream on and yap for a few hours.
  • Yoga – Did this to try and recover from injury a few years ago and found it really good fun and easy to fit in. Then just stopped after a few months. Should go back to it really.
  • Kayaking – We took a few lessons in a local swimming pool. Which was a bit chaotic. Would be nice to have one to play with in the summer, but never took it any further.
  • Chess – Played a bit in primary school and then spent a couple of months earlier this year addicted to chess.com and the chess side of YouTube. Considered joining a local club, but probably got enough going on just now.
  • Calisthenics – Like yoga, I got really into this as a way of conditioning for injury prevention. Also like yoga I just slowly stopped doing it and should pick it up again.
  • Snorkeling – Tried it on holiday, thought it was the best thing ever. There’s a big difference between doing it in the Mediterranean and doing it in the North Sea.
  • Trad music – Bought a mandolin and went along to some session classes a few years ago. Enjoy helping out at the local folk festival and still pick away at a load of tunes. My mandolin stays handy on a hook on my desk.
  • Boardgames – I’ve bought so many boardgames over the years and never play them.
  • Poker – There was a few years in the late 2000s when everyone was playing poker and it was on TV. Played a lot with friends then realised everyone took it way too seriously and I wasn’t enjoying it.
  • Building drones – Bought a cheap drone and it was fun. Built a small indoor one and it was fun. Started researching parts for a racing / stunt drone and realised it was going to be a horrendously expensive hobby and I didn’t need that in my life. Would still quite like a wee DJI drone to mess about with sometime for videos and photography.
  • Blogging – I took blogging and online writing quite seriously for a few years. Doing this food blog and some more tech orientated pieces on another site. Until, like a lot of my hobbies, I started focusing more on other things and just slowly stopped doing it.

Wow, that’s a lot! I count fifty two different hobbies. Some of those could probably be broken down a bit more if I really wanted to separate them out too. Also I’ve not included things like reading, watching TV, going to the cinema or going to the pub with friends. Things which I guess have taken up huge amounts of time over the years but it’s not like you’re practicing and developing skills for them. It’s just living a normal life. What I’ve listed are all pastimes that you need to consciously improve at and which take a bit of effort.

I’ve enjoyed all these hobbies I’ve tried over the years. Even the ones I’ve not carried through into middle age or just tried a few times and decided they weren’t for me. My one big regret I guess, is that I can’t help but think how much better I could have been at some of my favourite hobbies if I hadn’t been distracted by trying new things all the time. The old jack of all trades, master of none thing.

I like that it’s always been a mix of creative hobbies, exercise, and play. These are all sides of me that I think are equally important, though I often neglect one aspect when focussing on another. For example I have been skipping a lot of opportunities to get outside and be active recently because I got a new guitar and I’m keen to spend time playing that instead. It’s probably better to force myself to be more balanced when I can. Let me know what you think and how many hobbies you’ve tried over the years in the comments below!

News, Thoughts, Writing

I Submit

minceandskirlie

I know and I understand that to be a published writer I need to do two things – I need to write and I need to send work to publishers. I’ve not been great at the former, but I’ve always been terrible at the latter.

Despite this I still spend a lot of time feeling hard done by, that what little I do submit, rarely gets selected. Which is stupid. I know it’s stupid, but I can’t help it. The feeling of injustice when I see a competition winner announced or a magazine published without seeing a congratulations email appear in my inbox is large.

This isn’t because I think I deserve to win competitions, or that my work is so good it just has to be included in the must have literary journals, it’s just that from the moment I send the submission I start to hope; and as we all know it’s the hope that kills you.

All that negativity adds up and the result is I feel pretty down about the submission process and I submit less. Which, when I was starting from a pretty low submission rate, means I basically stopped submitting work altogether. Whoops.

Two things happened recently to change my attitude. First, I had some success (hooray!). A poem I submitted at the start of the summer, to a new local magazine by a spoken word collective, got accepted for publication (due out in November). For the second time in a row it was one I felt was the weakest in the submission package, but I’m not complaining! It just shows that you can never know what will click with someone.

The second thing was seeing this tweet about Sylvia Plath. That’s nine months of submissions.  Just seeing how hard she was working to get work published, even after her first collection had been released, made me realise that it doesn’t really matter who you are or how good the work is. The sheer volume of submissions editors get means that most people, even Sylvia Plath, will end up with more rejections than submissions. So to get work accepted I have to make the odds work more in my favour and that means I have to submit more and worry about rejection less.

This week I submitted work to three magazines and revamped my submissions spreadsheet to better track what I’ve submitted, to where, and if it was successful. With that and a more positive, but realistic, attitude to the process hopefully I can get some more success with my work. Or is it just more dreadful hope?

Writing

NaNoWriMo Go!

minceandskirlie

Image courtesy of National Novel Writing Month.

As with most stupid ideas, this one seemed like a good idea at the time. From tomorrow, November 1st, I’ll be taking part in my first NaNoWriMo event. What started as an American event is now a worldwide community of writers who get together and try to blitz 50,000 words in the month of November – National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo for short.

I feel like I have a solid idea for a story and I can usually write pretty fast once I sit down and get typing. Theoretically, I reckon I can bash out the required 1667 words per day in half an hour to an hour per day. Which isn’t a huge time commitment and doesn’t need to be tackled in a single sitting.  Theoretically.

My biggest issue with any of my hobbies, but especially writing, is that I get very, very easily distracted. Even now, while doing some last minute prep by going over some outline plans, I’ve spent more time looking up specifications and parts for a Raspberry Pi project than I have tweaking characters and story setting.

So while I’m looking forward to the challenge and really looking forward to seeing the story in my head take shape on my laptop screen, there’s a little voice which is telling me I’ve failed before I’ve even started. There’s no commitment other than saying “I’m doing this” so failure doesn’t mean anything except I’ve not hit my word count.  Fingers crossed I can keep that little voice subdued enough to get some momentum started tomorrow to get me rolling into the first week of the challenge and beyond.

Anyone else taking part this year? Add me as a buddy at https://nanowrimo.org/participants/chrisoff/ and let me know how you get on.

Video, Writing

A Sense Of Place

minceandskirlie

The National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh are holding an exhibition at the moment called A Sense Of Place. It focuses on Joan Eardley’s work from two particular locations – Glasgow and the village of Catterline.

It’s an astounding exhibition, featuring items loaned from public and private collections far and wide. The Glasgow pieces, possibly her most famous work, are amazing. Capturing the children of the tenements and the world they inhabit. But it’s the Catterline rooms which stopped me in my tracks.

I lived in Catterline from the age of 8 until I was 18. Those are some important years I spent there. Our house was built in a new street behind the path on the cliffs to the old coastguard watchhouse which used to act as Eardley’s studio (one of three houses in the village she used). I am very, very familiar with the locations, subjects, and weather which Joan painted and the places she captured them from.

To see images of the pier which we used to jump off, the sea stack we used to climb and the cliffs we spent years roaming on large scale canvas taking up entire rooms of the National Gallery is breathtaking. It provoked a lot of powerful emotion and memories for me.

When I got home I tried to parse some of those thoughts and emotions into a poem called – A Sense Of Place, which you can hear in the reading below.

The tagline on the National Galleries website is “Art that inspires”. In this exhibition they certainly achieved that.

Video, Writing

Burkini Bodies

minceandskirlie

The terror attack in Nice last year was devastating and horrifying. I love France and have nothing but fond memories of the Promenade des Anglais and the week we spent in Nice a few years ago.  Watching the aftermath on TV I was distraught at the fear which would now be endemic in such a beautiful and welcoming area. An area which over the centuries has seen migration (and occasional occupation) from across the Mediterranean resulting in an exciting diverse culture which takes bits of French, Italian, African, British, Spanish and many others.

Then in the weeks and months after another disaster unfolded, this time the victims weren’t strewn across a famous boulevard but instead, they were on a beach, beside their children, with police surrounding them. Women, doing nothing more than enjoying a day with their family, were harassed, insulted and demeaned into removing the clothing they were comfortable in wearing because people were scared that they looked different. Scared that they looked Muslim.

In my fury at the knee-jerk reaction of the French politicians and security forces, as well as the empathy I felt for the women affected – who are as much victims of Islamic terrorism as the western, Christian people targetted that night in Nice, I wrote the poem below, Burkini Bodies.