Wellbeing notes: Let your inner child play this September

01/09/2025 at 11:16 am | Posted in Uncategorized, Wellbeing notes | 2 Comments
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Yes, we’ve long moved on from the days when librarians told you to ‘hush’ in the library. But for older people like me, the conditioning runs pretty deep. Which was why what happened last week felt so very liberating. 

The Thursday Club, which meets in Chippenham Library, was set to discuss ‘Favourite forms of exercise, then and now’. Well, in the middle of the session, in a nice space between biographies and cook books, we all got up and took turns hula hooping. Even the librarians had a go. There was so much laughter. And afterwards, one of the group members took us through some simple line dancing moves, which hadn’t been planned but certainly added to the fun. 

Hula hoops, like the one shown here, carry the magical ability to make the person using them smile or even laugh, and it seems that line dancing has a similar effect. Maybe the laughter, the sheer feeling of wellbeing, isn’t in fact down to the hoop, or the dance steps. Maybe it’s simply because we’re having fun, we’re playing, in the company of friends old and new. It’s in those moments that our inner child emerges – because whatever age you might be chronologically, in the very heart of you lives your child-self, the being who loves to play, explore and generally have fun. 

This September, how might you let your own inner child out to play? 

Fiction notes: This is why libraries matter

15/10/2023 at 11:24 am | Posted in Fiction notes, Uncategorized | Leave a comment
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Yesterday I discovered that my local library was built on the site of a long-vanished Royal palace. On the outside, the building is an unremarkable, 20th Century design. But inside, it’s sheer magic. There are stories to lose yourself in, factual books to learn from, and a huge digital resource of free knowledge and entertainment.

In the library, children develop life-long reading skills which increase their opportunities to thrive. Older people come for company, for fiction, and to learn something new. As a free community resource, there’s always something going on: rhyme time; board games and hot chocolate; book clubs, home library deliveries…

When I recently returned after a long absence, I wondered why I’d stayed away. The reason, I decided, was a bad habit of handing books in late, and having to pay a fine. But nowadays there’s an app for that! You receive a polite reminder, and an invitation to renew with a simple button-touch.

Friendly, inclusive and educational, public libraries deserve to be cherished. In an era which has seen hundreds of library closures, a thousand redundancies and reduced investment in stock, we can unfortunately no longer take these wonderful places for granted.

My local library is quite simply a treasure… and from this point on, through being a member and also volunteering there, I’m doing my bit to support it.

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