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Running like a girl

7 May
My last run! So proud

My last run! So proud

Many’s the time that I’ve said a book has changed my life. I just never thought one would change the way I think about running.

I never thought I’d love running because I never thought I was capable. Running at school was more like a punishment than anything, a cold, lactic torture based entirely around muddy laps in winter. When I moved to London I walk-sludged Race for Life a couple of times, and optimistically did a very, very slow 10k round a horrible industrial estate in rainy Wembley when I was 24, but these were reluctant Things One Did For Charity. I never trained or got into it, just looked up from whatever I was drinking and smoking and went “Oh, okay then”. I didn’t even have kit. I did the 10k in high-waisted shorts from Primark like your classic unprepared dickhead.

A couple of years of sporadic jogging ensued from 2011, but it always felt too hard. I didn’t like challenging myself because a little voice told me that I would fail. In early winter last year I was in the midst of my usual seasonal fug where I can’t do anything much, or eat anything that isn’t a comforting, hot wheat-based dish. I dragged myself out for a lunchtime walk, winding around the river through Wapping, and sighing over all the runners going past.

“I wish I could run,” I thought.

And then – well, why can’t I? It’s just a question of jogging, but a bit faster, and doing more of it. The only person telling me I couldn’t run, was me.

(That same lunchtime walk also answered the “I wish I could own a cat” dilemma.)

The months passed, my cholesterol rose alarmingly, and eventually, towards the end of February, I felt optimistic enough to begin slowly. I downloaded Runkeeper and started walking to work. And after a couple of weeks of this and feeling pretty good, I went out armed with my beloved Zombies, Run! app for some very gentle jogging in a zombie apocalypse. Feeling ever more optimistic, I found a 10k that I could run for Special Effect in gaming fancy dress, and started a training plan, and today I’ve not only reached my sponsorship target thanks to my incredibly generous supporters, but News International will match it. HOORAH MONEY!

A key ingredient to me feeling as though I could, and was allowed to, get into running, was Alexandra Heminsley‘s book Running Like A Girl, which I have been feverishly recommending to all and sundry whether they run or not. I absolutely ate it up. I walked to work with my nose in my Kindle. I cried every time she wrote about running marathons (which was a lot – she has run a ridiculous amount of marathons) and identified with everything she wrote about not feeling like her body was meant for running, but getting over it and suddenly, joyfully realising that her body was capable of more than she had thought.

I really want that, I thought. I want my body to be capable of more. And really, I want to respect it enough to just bloody get on and do it.

So now I run. I’ve started venturing out at lunchtimes at work. I have an unironic bum bag. I have no idea why my hips hurt at times, but it feels so good when I suddenly realise I’ve run further than I was planning, or that my average pace has gone up, or that I will probably have to upgrade my trainers from the ones I got at Brixton TK Maxx, or that What the Hell by Avril Lavigne always comes on shuffle just as I’m trudging up the what-the-hill in Brockwell Park and needing that boost. After my 10k, I am going to do the Olympic Park run, and start training for a half-marathon.

Last week I got even more ambitious and went out with the Brixton Blog running club. I managed a whole five minutes at their pace before I had to tail off and carry on at my rather slower amble. But I see that as an achievement. Five minutes at their pace! When a year or two ago I would barely have done five minutes full-stop. The shitty little voice gets shut up now.

Slowly, steadily, I am becoming capable of more than I thought. And it’s scary, but above all gloriously freeing.

Last week I entered the ballot for the London Marathon.

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It’s hard the Shard stays mainly in the clard

8 Mar


I’ve wanted to go up to the top of The Shard for ages – or at least, ever since I stopped worrying that something was going to crash into it and destroy SE1. So when I got a call asking if I’d like a ticket, I obviously squeaked to the affirmative, even if I’d only be up there for 10 minutes, having to beetle across town to The Audience.

Yesterday was not a good evening. Unless you were John Carpenter.

view from the shard (1)

Mind, it hadn’t exactly been a great day either. But a trip up The Shard is a trip up The Shard! Anyway, we got there hugely early, and the staff very kindly said we could go up a bit before we were scheduled to. So we filled in time in the gift shop. Now, I love a gift shop – I actually did a little “gift shop!” sigh when we were told to wait there. But Jesus, there is some awful shit in there. Some lovely wall prints and silk scarves aside, everything looks as though it’s been bought off the back of a lorry and screenprinted.

The official Shard-approved biscuit was taken by the photographs. What a lovely idea, getting a professional photograph taken at the top, right? Oh my sadly mistaken friend.

view from the shard (32)

view from the shard (33)

You have your photo taken on the ground floor, next to the gift shop, and  the backdrop is superimposed for that authentic abducted by aliens with the power to make everything in focus.

My favourite bits of the whole building were the lifts, which went at about a bajillion miles an hour, and had been decked out with cinematic bits and bobs to make travelling 30 floors at the time feel like a cross between staying completely still and being crammed into a very short burst of a space film, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

view from the shard (5)

Even before you enter you’re treated to a wall-mounted light show showing where all the different lifts are, which excited me more than it probably should even for someone who is a known lover of lift travel.

view from the shard (4)

I kept waiting to turn a corner and see expensive people drinking Champagne, but none of the bars or restaurants seem to be open yet which is missing a MASSIVE trick because, clearly, the one place you want to get spangled is when you’re a trillion feet in the air, or about to get into yet another bizarre lift.

view from the shard (30)One of the corridors to yet another lift was covered in rambling phrases about London, including Camberwell! Yay Camberwell! Boo for the last, plain corridor which looked like it had only just been purchased from IKEA.

Anyway, then we got to the top. It was like being in Silent Hill – The Shard was hysterically, absolutely surrounded by cloud. This poor old couple looked like they were contemplating jumping, or at least the fact they’d just paid £50 to look at mist.view from the shard (31)It really was just…strange. There was this ghostly choral music which might have been quite nice and moving on a clear day when you’re oohing and aahing, but just served to make you feel UTTERLY FREAKED OUT by not being able to see a damn thing unless you stared down, in which case you could just about make out some lights from the streets below.

view from the shard (18)view from the shard (6)view from the shard (17)

Back inside to some shiny, shiny walls and floors, and some night vision telescopes showing you what you would be seeing if you weren’t trapped in a Doctor Who peasouper episode from 1874.

view from the shard (27) view from the shard (24) view from the shard (20)

There were a couple of people walking around in fits of laughter at how utterly impenetrable the cloud was.  I thought the whole thing was utterly hysterical too – but then hey, I hadn’t paid.

One nice thing though: despite this being a work freebie, our tickets had been paid for and booked in advance, and it turns out we were given vouchers to come back another day when visibility is better. Til the next time – I shall Shard once more.

PS: Something AMAZINGLY LOVELY for the weekend.

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Trying to find a witty but appropriate headline for a blog about a homeless shelter, failing

1 Mar

It’s a cliché that you must learn something valuable from volunteering. As though, rather than something you do to help or to fill your spare time, it’s Lucy’s cordial, healing you and making you feel all warm inside.

Sometimes this is true. Sometimes it isn’t, and you just spend a few hours wringing your hands and feeling utterly useless.

When I walked into my church’s community centre last Friday, I felt useless. I was spending the evening as a host at our night shelter for the homeless (part of London’s Robes project, a church-run winter night shelter which operates from November to March). Just one evening, but as I’d learned from the bad weeks on the hospital ward, there’s nothing worse than standing around.

Giving up Twitter has been my biggest Lenten success so far, being that doing chocolate gives me borderline panic two hours in, and the year I tried to give up red meat I spent the entire time chomping on lamb thinking that it didn’t count. Other than that, I’ve been too busy to do anything useful, so I was quite pleased when it turned out my church group traditionally does one of the Robes evenings each year.

There will now be a short pause to discuss the loaded meaning of being in a church group

Other than the friends and family who came to my confirmation, I don’t know anyone my age who goes to church near me. I wanted to get to know people, and meet more unmarried, unchildified near my age. When our young lady vicar, Mother W, suggested I join the youth group (and I use that term very, very loosely), I had to confess that I was way, way too old to attend.

“Oh don’t worry about that, I’m over 30 too,” she said, somewhat incredibly given that she has the angelic looks of a 19-year-old. Clearly, sacred wine is better for you than prosecco.

I went for the first time in January and my mind was boggled more than it had ever boggled before. The small group was late 20s early 30s and ranged from gay men to straight women and people with the most amazing-sounding jobs. Then we drank a lot of unblessed alcohol. The senior vicar, Father X, made us the most incredible negronis. Then we had pâté and quiche while discussing that session’s book club choice – The Game, by Neil Strauss. If you’ve not read it, it’s about picking up women through dressing up like a colossal tit and making them feel just bad enough about themselves to go “Hell YEAH I’ll come home with you you exciting and mysterious man.” It is actually brilliant, and fortunately for me, but unfortunately for the book group because I talked a lot, I’d read it a few years ago.

This was interspersed with discussion, prayer and a reading that tried to be as appropriate to Neil Strauss’s The Game as it is possible to be. It was all rounded off with a trip to church for a service called compline, and we then headed to the Game-loving prayer reader’s house for more wine and left-over Christmas chocolates.

It was brilliant, and weird, and really great, but now anyone that I mention it to naturally makes the frozen “Shit me, you’re in a cult” face.

Back to last Friday…

The distinctly un-culty members of the un-cult are great, even if I have a long way to go to make up for my lengthy tirades about The Game. On Friday I was hosting (this is a great piece about what happens during an evening). I got the wrong mugs out of the cupboard because I didn’t know where anything was, piling up little useless green teacups onto the side before another vicar from the church, Father Y, who was running the evening pointed out where they were. Two of the group did the cooking, others also hosted, while visitors from another part of the country joined in, with a view of bringing Robes to their own parishes.

Meanwhile, our 18 male guests were arriving, setting up their campbeds and bedding, wary of each other’s space. I spent two hours thinking one of the charismatic guests was actually in charge of the evening – later, he pulled out a piece from the Brighton Argus, where I’ve been doing my weekend sub-editing course, which told the story of how a friend of his, also homeless, had been beaten to death in Hove and his body left hidden under a duvet on the street.

There is the most godawful quote in this story, from Julian Haddow, the project manager for the homelessness project AntiFreeze, in which he says, “Living as a rough sleeper is very dangerous. People choosing this lifestyle need to be aware of the risks.”

I’m sorry, choose?

What became abundantly clear over the course of the evening was that nobody here had chosen to be homeless. Circumstances, the recession, missed letters, there didn’t seem to be a lot of choice. And as nice as the community centre is, and the Robes Project, it’s not substitute for a stable home of your own.

The men who I spoke to, who were up for a game of cards – I abandoned chess after it was pointed out to me I’d got my bishops and knights the wrong way round – didn’t fit my bill of homeless, my well-honed media-rich bill of what a homeless person should be, and should look like. When a bishop turned up later, I had to stare at him very carefully before the enormous bit of amethyst on his finger finally convinced me that he wasn’t just a latecomer to stay the night.

There was an accountant, a solicitor, a photographer.  At dinner, an African man produced a copy of The Times and, as a reader of three years’ standing, subjected me to an extremely knowledgeable grilling about the paper’s direction and what could be done to improve it (I drew the line at reducing the amount of news).

Their stories aren’t mine to tell, not now, at least.

It was snowing that night. I am very glad I have a home, and don’t have to stay in hostels or shelters, like so many families and individuals have to.

Robes Project 2013

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Pinstrosity Challenge: Shaun the Sheep cake

11 Feb

As with so many things that bring me joy, it started with Buzzfeed. 17 Pinterest fails, before and after shots showing the delectable craft/bake dream, and the hilariously godawful reality.

My lust for schadenfreude required more,  and so I found Pinstrosity, an amazing blog that provides both the from-the-gut walrus mirth honks I require from my craft fails, as well as providing helpful tips on why they have gone wrong and how to remedy it for next time. (90% of problems are because the crafter/baker didn’t follow the instructions to the letter).

For their first birthday, they asked readers to find something they liked the look of on Pinterest,  have a go, and send in their blog. It didn’t have to be a disaster, which is a relief, because the one I tried turned out like a FREAKING DREAM. It was only me who got a lot of it wrong.

My favourite colleague Dan,  owner of Boycie, The World’s Most Fabulous Cat, and his lovely wife Cat ended up saving two sheep while on a walk in the country near their home on the south coast. I thought this was brilliant, and having planned to make some office cake anyway that week, decided to make a sheep cake in Dan and Cat’s honour.

One of the ideas Dan sent me was Smart Mama’s utterly amazing Shaun the Sheep cake.

Smart Mama's Shaun the Sheep cake

How gorgeous is this?

It all looked tremendously simple. I decided to make my favourite carrot cake recipe (BBC Good Food’s Ultimate Makeover carrot cake) which has been doing me sterling service for nearly four years.

Here’s the thing: Americans are obsessed with fake food. Packet cake recipes! Candy melts! Eurgh. If I’m going to eat something that’d bad for me, I want it to be because it’s so full of sugar and chocolate that I could explode at any minute.

Smart Mama made her own almond pound cake (no packets here), but instead of the dreaded candy melts, I used Green and Black’s cooking milk chocolate. And instead of cutting out templates for the ears and feet and face – I am the most appallingly inept cutter-outer of templates for baking – I used spoons and drizzled out the melted chocolate onto greased paper, keeping a hawk eye on Smart Mama’s outlines. A laptop in the kitchen is a recipe book in the kitchen.

making shaun the sheep cake face

Ovine body parts

I took many,  many liberties due to being cheap. I didn’t use marshmallows for the eyes, because I would have had to buy an entire bag. Instead, I marked outlines with white writing icing, whisked up some white icing and pooled it into that, before using black writing icing for his pupils.

It worked brilliantly,  right up until I got to the bits where I had been sloppy, and hadn’t sealed the circles probably. OH KATHERINE.

making shaun the sheep cake

Assembling Shaun! So Frankenstein. Look at him, all naked and wool-deprived.

Some other laziness: the icing for the BBC Good Food recipe (which is possibly the healthiest carrot cake under the sun) requires Quark, a fat-free cheese thing, and low-fat cream cheese as well. “Oh let’s just make the icing with Quark to save a bit more money,” I thought. NEGATIVE, KATHERINE. The icing was so incredibly thin and slopping it may as well have been actual water.

Undeterred, I added on my chocolate face accoutrements. I hadn’t put them in the fridge, as I didn’t want them to go all cloudy. I should have put them in the fridge: as soon as I picked up the ears, they bent,  and one cracked.

I positioned the face, ears and two of the legs on the cake, and then realised that the ears were bending and breaking proper John Gordon-style. I broke off some of the ear nearest the face to balance it out.

Then I started putting on the little marshmallows I’d got. Amazing! My rather iffy Shaun started to look properly sheep-like. Again, because I’d skimped on the icing, I didn’t do around the sides, but from the top-down I thought it looked rather impressive.

As long as you didn’t look too closely, obvs. But what the hell, let’s look closely so you can see what’s wrong. That’ll teach me for being sniffy about candy melts.

Tada! My Shaun the sheep cake

Tada! My Shaun the sheep cake

So, in keeping with all good Pinterest fails, this went wrong because I didn’t follow the instructions properly. I didn’t even follow the instructions for my own cake properly!

Why it went wrong

- Icing wasn’t strong enough
- Decided to do completely different stuff for the eyes
- Didn’t close the outline on the eyes
- Didn’t chill the chocolate, or really make sure it was the right length

Why it worked
It’s a credit to Smart Mama’s vision that you can cut a million corners,  and still end up with an impressive, dead easy cake. Cheers to that, and happy first birthday to Pinstrosity.

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Sometimes you just need to set your writing on fire and stamp it to death in the street

14 Jan

I don’t know what I was expecting when I signed up to Frances Taylor and Charlie ‘Ultraculture’ Lyne’s new writing venture Burn Night. It certainly wasn’t writing something that I was really proud of. And it definitely wasn’t watching someone set fire to it half an hour later.

I met Katie Khan of Awkward Situations for Girls fame at Charing Cross and we trudged over to Pall Mall to the wildly arty ICA, the pair of us carved out of a wildly unarty wool and waterproofs combo. Katie just started the Faber Academy course and will likely be on your Christmas reading list come 2014, but as I’ve done nothing since October apart from 3hundredand65 and transcribing all the voice memos I make on the lovely winding route back home at night, I needed to do something.

(You can tell we were keen because we were a) out at night b) out at night in winter c) out on a Sunday night in winter and Katie was missing her mum’s roast dinner.)

The 40-odd people piled into the Studio had applied to take part, and there was some joshing around at the beginning, literally, about a poor chap who’d written in but had just missed the cut. Charlie and Frances made a poster apologising.

sorry josh pappenheim burn night

Well. If anything is going to make you feel a bit smug around the edges, it’s hearing about people who missed the cut. IF ONLY WE’D KNOWN.

We were given a load of A4 paper each and a theme to write on. From the groans and cries of “But…but what?” from around the room, they were about as inspiring as mine:

burn-night-writing-topic

I know absolutely sod all about how paper is made. There are trees? At some point pulping happens? What is pulping exactly?

But then again, the joy of having a prompt and a deadline means that whatever you think, your brain is totally concentrated. You can’t fuck about going “But what if I go in that direction? Or…or what if the main character is actually just a made-up dream from that character I haven’t actually thought of yet, but probably has really lovely hair?”, you just have to think of an idea and go for it.

So I wrote a story about a teenage American tree who was bored out of his wits living in the same boring area of the forest with his parents. He wants to go somewhere else – anywhere else – but can’t. He’s resentful about the fact his brother died through not growing properly. He fights with his dad. And eventually, he gets his wish, because his desire to go somewhere else is so strong that some paper-millers come and cut him down.

I finished my story and felt that tentative relief of having written something good in an hour. We folded up the paper and handed them in, and Charlie gave us a new story to read. Confusion bells started ringing when he said that only one person would read it, but whatever. I trust teacher with the implicit trust of someone who went to a very bossy secondary school. I really enjoyed the one I had, a very po-faced, funny bit of autobiography about why the author only likes bland food, and occasionally, crisps. It had some great lines in it. RIP crisp story.

Afterwards, we got our stuff together, left the ICA , and followed Charlie and Frances to one of the swish streets around the back. A very, very quiet swish street where Charlie proceeded to hand out matches and lighters and tell us to set fire to the story we were holding.

burn-night

I don’t know whose story this is. I don’t know if the person who read mine liked it, or even finished it (it was seven sides of A4) but we burned them. A disinterested security guard watched us from down the street. At one point there was a little bonfire of stories. Then Charlie opened a bottle of Champagne to toast the engagement of Picturehouse’s Sam Clements and we walked back to the ICA. No explanation. No Charlie’s Final Thought. We wrote something in an hour, and then set fire to someone else’s.

As disappointed as I am not to have that story, it’s probably a good thing. I don’t need to read it and see the horrendous flaws, or pick it apart. Jilly Cooper left her first Riders manuscript on a bus, and eventually re-wrote it even better. And it reminded me that I can write something with a deadline. In fact, that I need deadlines to write. And if I’m ever going to deliver this book to an agent this year, perhaps what I need to do is to give myself 30 prompt lines, one per chapter, and an hour to write as much as I can. And then perhaps I can go from someone who would quite like to be a novelist, to someone who actually is.

Still, a Sunday night is a Sunday night. I left everyone in the bar and went home to see the cat who I’d adopted from Battersea that afternoon. But that’s a story for another day.

I can’t think of a funny title for a blog about being in the Olympics Opening Ceremony

27 Jul

One of my audition badges – an amazing bookmark since 2011

This blog is going to be the most appalling mess. I’m sorry about that. I had planned to sleep until the last possible minute so I could be fresh as a proverbial for tonight, but it’s hot, and lovely and I have thoughts going round my head like a particularly lumpen spin cycle. Continue reading →

Why zombies are taking over Britain

15 Jun

You might have read the story about scientists figuring out how to survive a zombie attack. Or the Reading zombie shopping mall. Or 2.8 Hours Later selling out all its London dates. But why do we give a crap anyway?

The zombies are coming! Toronto zombie parade, 2009 ( Eric.Parker, Flickr)

If you have kinemortophobia – fear of the undead – then look away now. Around Britain, the dead are coming back to life. What nobody expected was that they would be wearing quite so much make-up.

Thankfully it’s not a genuine zombie apocalypse, but the craze for all things undead has resulted in immersive theatrical games that give thrill-seekers the chance to fend off ‘zombies’ with replica weaponry, or simply try to outwit them for long enough to stay alive.

“It’s like a ghost train, but you take away the train,” says Lee Fields, a former special effects designer who created the Zombie Mall Experience in Reading to combine his love of Airsoft – a sort of paintball without the paint – with zombies.

“Zombie culture has been building for years,” he told me. “The draw is constant, impending doom: it’s like real life, death’s always going to get you in the end. The zombie apocalypse is one of those genres where people genuinely wonder what they would do.” Continue reading →

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Would you hold my hand?

28 May

Holding hands with Louise Brodie

Louise and I hold hands. Picture by Lou Brodie

What do you think about, when I say “holding hands”? Is it pig-tailed girls swinging their arms and giggling, best friends. Or lovers with their palms glued together, or running their fingers over one another’s hands just to make sure they’re real?

I think of love. Whether it’s a consolatory hand-hold to tell a sad friend that I’m listening, or skipping hysterically down a street after way, way too much prosecco, or walking down the street smiling happily at my boyfriend, I only hold hands with people I love. Oh, not my parents though. My family loves each other dearly, but from a distance.

Apparently the UK is jolly rare in thinking of hand-holding in such a limited fashion. While idly combing the internet for more things to do in my beloved Camberwell, I came across a work in progress by Louise Brodie, called Palm To Palm – The Art of Holding Hands:

Would you hold hands with me? Not because you love me, or because you must take care of me, or because I’m in distress. Would you hold hands with me just because I asked you to?

Join Louise as she invites you to take part in her daily challenge – To hold someone’s hand for 30 minutes. Louise is doing this everyday in 2012 and for a few nights at the Ovalhouse she will attempted to create a theatrical journey that explores her discovery of Britain’s touch-deprived culture.

As one of life’s perennial button-pressers, stray-hair fiddlers and responder to calls for participants, I couldn’t resist. I messaged Lou on Twitter and we arranged to meet up in the park near my flat on Saturday morning.

When I started to really think of it though, I got slightly nervous. Half an hour can zoom by – a really good episode of Modern Family plus ad breaks – but it can also drag –  the truly abysmal 2 Broke Girls I watched after The Apprentice. And what did I really think about it? I kiss people I’ve not met before hello, I shake their hands. But then I move back into my space, and they into theirs. I don’t hold their hand.

We met up and Lou was delightful. A relaxed Glaswegian with Titian hair and freckles, she and I looked like variations on a theme. She asked me where I would like to go. As one of the world’s least decisive people, I settled on “There. No, there!” before finally suggesting we sit by the Myatt’s Fields summer house. There is a nice bench.

Lou set her phone timer (really) so she didn’t have to keep checking the time, and we held hands. And – it was completely normal. There was no rush of sparks or emotion flowing between us just because we were holding hands. It was just something I quickly got used to, but I initiated conversation to distract from it. I asked her about hand holding.

Like me, Louise turns 30 this year. “What do you do if the usual signs that you’ve made it by 30 don’t apply to you?” she asked. This was her answer – sharing time with the people she loved, or worked with, or new people altogether. The work-in-progress, a commission by Ovalhouse Theatre, came into mind about two months after she had started.

It was also interesting to hear how hand-holding is viewed around the world. Boys in India apparently walk around hand-in-hand like they’re in Enid Blyton. A South American girl who took part in the WIP didn’t bat an eyelid, but an old British school friend, who had contacted Louise out of the blue specifically to take part in the project, couldn’t go through with it.

We talked about the other people she had met through the project: the overwhelming majority of women taking part. A mum who held hands while looking out for her toddler son. A nice liberal chap in Clapham, the only male ‘stranger’ so far. The only time she had held hands in silence was with a woman who wanted to meditate, in the end, they meditated on the hand-holding.

And eventually I confessed to why I wanted to hold hands. As I told friends later that night, while my first instincts had been “Ooh! Local! Taking part! Theatre!”, when I thought about it later I realised that a lot of it was selfish. When I was a teenager, feminine clothes didn’t really fit me. I was tomboyish. I had no female role models. My boyfriend was shorter than me, had long blond hair and we would get mistaken for a gay couple. I was tall, so I always had to be “the man”, or a character part. I spent so much of my teenage years feeling that I wasn’t allowed to be “a woman”. I didn’t like people making decisions about who I was on my behalf, particularly at a time when I had absolutely no idea myself.

I said I was being selfish, using this as a sort of resolution for my gender issues. “I’m being selfish asking people to give up their time each day,” said Louise cheerfully. We agreed to glory in our mutual selfishness. The sun shone. The alarm went off. Lou went to Battersea to run a workshop, and I went to get a coffee and roll around in the grass, feeling a bit more free.

Louise Brodie is holding hands with someone for half an hour every day in 2012. You can contact her through her blog, or via Twitter @loubrodie.

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