California walk and some thoughts about sport
This week I've been writing about soccer and dreaming of sunny days
I wrote this post on Tuesday, when the weather was a special sort of supergloom, the kind of day where god forgot to put the light on. It's the first time this winter I've felt a real yearning for the sun's warmth; I’d give anything to have a coffee outside in the garden without needing to wear (let me check) three thermal vests. For now, I'm going to live vicariously, and somewhat self-indulgently, through my own holiday photos and share this ultimate stet-walk* from last July when we spent three glorious weeks in the Bay Area with our dear friends and their kids, our godchildren.
It was an amazing time in the Californian sun, plus some of the famous foggy 'no-sky-July' on the occasions we headed into the city, via ferry. Highlights of our stay included walking among the redwoods with chipmunks scooting around, swimming in the sea off the sandiest of beaches, eating the freshest peaches and barbecued corn-on-the-cobs, sipping wine at a Sonoma Valley vineyard with hummingbirds hovering at the next table, walking (hiking) up into the mountains (with coffee, melon, and a huge stack of pancakes as reward), and much much more (which I’m sure I’ll be drawn to write more about another time). We took loads of photos, but I shared barely any during the trip itself; I think because I was happy to be enjoying the moment, to be in the present, and maybe I knew I'd want to revisit the memories properly on a rainy UK day such as today when the weather, and the world, is far from A-OK.
Our stateside trip has also been on my mind this week because the copywriting project I've been working on for a client is all about one of my godson's favourite subjects: soccer. (Boy, I wish I'd retained all the football facts he shared with me over the summer). Sport is one of the things that can get left out, in England anyway, of what comes under the banner of culture. I'm guilty of this myself – I often forget about it as being a part of our creative expression as humans, and have laughed many a time at that repeated line from the BBC's Twenty Twelve — the satirical series about organising the London Olympic Games — of ‘the Department of Culture, Media, And Also For Some Reason Sport’. But when I'm writing about sport, and in this specific instance about football, it feels at one with other creative fields — completely aligned with music, art, dance, craft as a shared experience that brings meaning and wonder into our lives. In other words: it's good for the soul.
Is writing or thinking about walking and sport as beneficial as actually doing it? Well, I imagine the answer is: definitely not (lol). But permit me, on this rainiest and dullest of days, to take myself for a walk not in the gloomy reality outside but via these snaps of a summer evening stroll with my love along the Corte Madera marsh path, a walk filled with the scent of wild fennel and the glow of the setting sun. I hope you have a memory you can visit that will be good for your soul today, or feel free to borrow mine.
*What is a stet-walk, you might ask. In copyediting, ‘stet’ is what we do when we leave something be: allowing a possible error to escape when it isn’t critical that it be corrected – maybe because it’s a matter of opinion or because changing it could inadvertently create other (potentially greater) mistakes, especially at a late stage in the publishing process. Stet is Latin for ‘let it stand’, so a stet walk is a cute ‘n’ geeky in-joke in the editing community for ‘time to let the editor stand, leave things be for the moment, and stretch those legs’.