Fresh Feet

Leeds has felt paradoxically quiet lately, returning to the city for final year. Friends, acquaintances and familiar faces from the last two years have moved on for work, travel, whatever - while all the time the campus gets busier. Freshers. For many, the pace of life picks up again in September. Fresh blood courses through the veins of a red brick institution and you worry about being left behind.

Then I realise I’ve forgotten one of the oldest rules in the book: life doesn’t stand still, so move with it. Not all good things come to an end, but they transmute into something else right (energy cannot be created or destroyed)? There are new memories to make and new successes to be had. So, gather your things and get outside. The world is waiting.

Tents & Beats

 

Over at CrazyTomDrop.com, Leeds post-grad Tom Hartland blogs about the latest electro sounds and heavy beats pounding speakers via the internet. His music blog project started in January this year and it's expanded. Now the website has a stream of regular visitors and a team of writers bringing good tunes to the people who want them. 

My first post at CrazyTomDrop reviews the new, old and beautiful music at Bestival this summer:

http://wp.me/p29Bog-uY

Wild by Jay Griffiths

I've been catching up on some reading during my lunch hour at work, thumbing the yellow, dusty pages of books neglected. 

Wild: An Elemental Journey is a travel book by Jay Griffiths published in 2008. I say travel book, it's a more of an ode to travel, to people and nature. The book is unlike any other book I've read; the writing itself is wild, full of poetry and manifesto. The author visits indigenous communities around the world (for example: Shamans in the Amazon, Inuit in the Arctic Circle, Aborigines in deep Australia), talking about the culture, sex, language and landscape of wild places, sometimes incorrectly termed 'wilderness'. Once you tune into the language, you can lose yourself in the book, and it certainly makes a lunch hour sitting on the grass outside offices in Warwick a lot more interesting.

Talking about nomadism

"But the lure of wild and nomadic freedom has never left us, any of us. It is in our lungs, breathing in freedom, in our eyes, hungry for horizons, and in our feet, itching for the open road. Put your boots on." (Griffiths, 2008, p.310)

Photo by Katie Mckay