Juneathon Day 1: What has Juneathon ever done for me?

2011 Streak Day 152/365: Run - 3.32 miles, Time 31min 8sec, Weather - a bright sunny morning.

Early morning light and shade

Yesterday's post was a waste of space, for which I apologise. The reason was that it was only half the story. Just mentioning that you always carry fragments from your childhood with you and that odd events or circumstances can bering them to the forefront of your conscious mind does not get us very far.

The interesting corollary is to look at the way these childhood memories, attitudes and impressions can form the way we approach tasks throughout our lives and affect our success. The way that the way we run, for example, and our perception of our capabilities can be hugely influenced by early experiences.I will return to this later when I will discuss a famous educational experiment which discovered dramatically different consequences when a child was told it was intelligent from when it was told it was hard working. 

I didn't do it yesterday because I felt tired. This is the problem of blogging everyday - I sometimes don't feel I have the time to gather all the material I need to discuss something more fully and so I end-up recording fleeting sensations.

But now Juneathon is here and I should stop worrying because it is a grand repository of fleeting sensations. Approximately two hundred people will be recording their experiences of exercising everyday - a dizzying number given the very small beginnings.

I remember the first one (I think it was the first one), which I didn't officially do. The original challenge was to run every day but as this is something I never do, I knew I would not complete so I did something related called photothon where I took a photo every time I went out (if you want to browse through some of the pictures I took they are here).

It completely changed the way I blogged so that now, more often than not I integrate a photo and all the time I am looking out for things in a way I never did before. Observing the landscape is now an important part of the enjoyment or running, walking, cycling. And now my 2011 challenge is nothing more than an extended Photothon.

The fact that Juneathon has had a significant impact on this blog is neither here nor there. Its true value is in being a supportive community of people sharing their challenges, their successes and their failures. There are a lot of people doing good and it is a pleasure to learn more about them.

So good luck for everyone starting Juneathon this year. I hope the experience is enriching.

2011 Streak Day 151/365: Thinking of childhood

2011 Streak Day 151/365: Run - 3.31 miles, Time 31min 05sec, Weather - warmer and sunnier as the day progressed (I ran first thing in the morning)

Yesterday I posted a rather good poem by Philip Gross. Today I took a photo of a delphinium and all I could think of was a verse by AA Milne: There once was a dormouse who lived on a bed / Of delphiniums (blue) and geraniums (red).

I know one of the ideas of the 2011 project is for me to see something and make some associations but reaching back into my childhood, and recovering one of the pebbles that rattles about, is stretching it a bit far. I might just as well have taken a photo of a wheelbarrow and said:  "Jonathan Joe had a mouth like an O and a wheelbarrow full of surprises".

As you will probably guess I was bought up on AA Milne - my mother liked reading the verse as well as Winnie the Pooh and used to sing me to sleep with 'Christopher Robin is saying his prayers'

What this has left me with is fragments. I cannot remember anything as long as a verse but the odd line or two will occasionally bubble to the surface.

So much of your childhood is always with you. You do not carry it around in the forefront of your conscious mind but every so often something will jog a little memory and you can picture things as they were