Missing the Mountains

Dance in Company | Saturday 7th March | 7 - 11pm | Come be part of a community and feel a connection on the dance floor....

Who‘s coming to Dance in Company?

The time has come Lovers. In just a few days we will be gathering to disconnect from our phones and the internet. We’re going to leave behind the wormholes and the opinions, the outrage and the click baiting and reconnect with each other ~ in person ~ on a dance floor.

Would love you to join us

Read all about it here. Become a Subscriber to find out the venue and a Paid Subscriber to be able to bring a plus one

Let’s be the change we want to see…..By shaking our asses to old school Kylie…

Norway | November 2024

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There is a yearning that circumnavigates my body ever winter.

The first three months of the year are when the yearning is at its most potent. When I dream of being rich with no responsibilities and can afford to spend the first quarter of each year in the mountains.

I desperately want to be in a modernised Heidi style cabin in the snowy mountains where, every morning, I get to push open the wooden shutters of my beautifully designed, very large so that it an accommodate my family and friends, cabin and my eyes are blinded by whiteness. By a blanket of untouched pure snow that heavily coats the nearby trees and smells fresh and light and full of the days potential.

When the start of the year is grey and depressing and the days are pathetically short I hunker down and watch Ski Sunday each week. It’s my happy place. Visually and aurally. I can be pottering around my flat and just the sound of race commentary soothes me. Of poles clinking, cow bells ringing, crowds cheering. The count down for a racer, the scrape of ski edges on ice. It’s all part of my muscle memory.

Skiing is so ingrained in my body that I don’t remember when I started. I can’t give you an age. I also don’t know how to teach anyone how to ski. I have no recollection of being taught technique. I just know instinctively how to do it. How my body moves on skies is as natural as walking to me. I can be at the top of a slope and know exactly how to get to the bottom. But I couldn’t explain that to you.

The freedom of gliding and turning and planting and speeding is my body in a state of flow.

That’s a skill right? Being able to get down the face of a mountain in one piece? So, I do have a skill. Unfortunately I have a skill that isn’t showcased very often. It’s something I have to tell people and even then it’s not that impressive.

Hey, You know I ski really well?

Ok sure. Can I see it on your Instagram?

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Chamonix | February 2022

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There is so much effort involved in skiing. So much huffing and puffing. The outfits, the equipment, the restrictions, the transport. To get to the top of a mountain involves armour that is bulky and cumbersome, impractical. Shoehorning the boots on alone is exhausting. Then you need to carry your skies and your poles, get yourself into a moving gondola, onto a moving chair lift, a very unstable button lift.

All of the above should be skills worthy of being on a CV.

Whilst all the prep can be frustrating, time consuming and tiring they are an intregal part of the yearning. They are the necessary first act because when you’re standing at the top of a run with the sun on your face breathing in air so cool and crisp it sometimes hurts your lungs the second act can be pure magic. It has all been worth it to get to this point.

Now the whole story unfolds.

Now you get to flow.

You get to move your body in ways it instinctively knows how to. The sounds alone tells you how well you’re doing. Whether you need to react differently, lean forward, dig deeper, slow down, speed up. Even when tired there’s something magical that gets you to the top of the slope and helps you make your own way down again.

I yearn for the snow that blinds and the air that revives. For the fatigue and elation. For the feeling of accomplishment. Of speed and presence. I yearn so badly but I rarely get. I took it for granted when it was available to me every year. It was a given that I would get to plant myself in stunningly restorative vistas and valleys and partake in a sport that feeds my soul and makes my heart burst.

Man, I miss the mountains so badly.

Sophie in Chamonix | February 2022

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📰Further AD WRITES should you so be interested…go on…I know you’re interested:

Hot In The City

Alone in Athens: A Third Culture Kids Journey Back Home

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CC in Baquiera | February 2015

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The Contents of My Consumption

~ Watching 📺~

• How to get to Heaven from Belfast | Netflix

  From the creator of Derry Girls, Lisa McGee, has produced another fantastic show that is literally overflowing with women. Set around three friends from Belfast who discover that an old school friend has died…or has she. As expected the humour is wise crackingly witty but the never ending unfolding of this ‘murder mystery’ can be touching too. There’s some fantastic performances including great Irish stars such as Bronagh Gallagher, Saoirse Monica Jackson, Ardal O’Hanlan and our very own Siobhan O’Kelly Yer Wan Off The Telly pops up as a small but integral part {See her being fabulous in my short film about periods here}

• Bodyform | Never Just a Period | YouTube

  Speaking of periods, CC sent me this advert for Bodyform sanitary towels, which is actually a year old now, but had completely passed me by. Sometimes I just marvel at how incredible women are and want to shout so loudly about what we go through with our bodies. When I think about what we’re not told, what we have to discover on our own and how we deal with bleeding and functioning every month I just know that we’re all Superwomen. I shed a tear or two when it finished.

~ Listening 🎧 ~

• Stories from Saturday Night Live | Good Hang with Amy Poehler | Wherever you listen to your podcasts

  As if Amy Poehler was a subscriber to AD Writes {can you imagine!!} and was responding to my need to be surrounded by excellent teamwork Good Hang has produced a compilation of SNL guests and their stories about being on that phenomenal show. My favourite was Seth Myers describing what it was like to be invited to hang with his former female colleagues, all in their mid 50s, for a maximum of 30 minutes and then being asked to leave.

  Thank you for coming and now thank you for leaving

  Also! I’ve just seen that a compilation of Parks and Recreation memories has been posted. Can’t wait to listen to that.

~ Reading 📚~

• The Trees by Percival Everett

  My crush on Percival Everett is probably going to spill over into infatuation. After reading James I knew I needed more. When a dead body is found in Money, Mississippi with a second body lying next to it resembling that of lynched and murdered Emmet Till you know something wild is going to happen. It was so fast paced and initially gruesome that I couldn’t read it at night as my heart rate went crazy. The efficiency of Everett’s writing means he gets to the point quickly and we can move the story along. Like in James he’s making a political statement about race and the history of racism in America but manages to camouflage it with humour and characters that seem frivioulous but are so powerful. When I finished I felt like I had actually experienced a movie.

• The Hard Lessons in that BAFTA’s Gaff by Raven Smith | Vogue.com

  I have struggled for the past few weeks to make sense of what happened at the BAFTA’s. The fact that so many people were put into situations that made them feel humiliated and uncomfortable AND were made to publicly deal with those feelings is baffling to me. There is, of course, many a hot take on what should and shouldn’t have happened but I found Raven Smith’s essay the most thought provoking:

  In a fair, progressive society, we have to be able to reconcile collisions of disability, history, and television with our insatiable appetite for outrage. There’s always going to be an awkward negotiation between other people’s realities and our own. The only dignified response is to hold two uncomfortable truths at once: that a man can not be responsible for his words, and that those words can still wound.

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