1 Solicitor 268 Miles 17 days - The Pennine Way

 

This year I have decided to take up the mother of all New Year's Resolutions - to walk the Pennine Way.  I'm a huge lover of the great outdoors so this seemed the most natural thing to do.  Since I was a child, I have been a fell walker - scaling some of the highest peaks in the British Isles with my friends and family and loving every minute of it.  Plus, with all the issues playing out in the world we live in right now - from the pandemic, to politics and poverty - I wanted to do something really positive for myself and others that would be challenging, raise energy levels and be generally excellent for our wellbeing: physically, mentally and spiritually.

So to begin, I am a 48 year old woman.  I work as a solicitor for Napthens in Preston, Lancashire as Head of Plot Sales.  It's a demanding and rewarding role and Napthens are a great firm to work for.  About 3 years ago I was probably about 3 stone heavier than I am now and hadn't exercised since my early 20's.  I decided it was time to change when I started struggling to get up the stairs to get on the train into London where I worked as a Solicitor, at the time.  I was born in Lancashire but lived in Essex for just over 12 years.  I have an old injury to both knees which is the result of a motorbike accident I had in my late teens.  At the start of 2019 I started to attend my local gym to try to get fit.  I asked for the help of a personal trainer, Seral Mehmet, to help me on my journey and I still attend sessions with Seral three times a week via Zoom, despite him living in Essex. Seral started the Zoom sessions during the first pandemic lockdown in England to keep his clients fit when we couldn't go out anywhere!  Over a period of time, through this regular exercise and a healthier diet (apart from a few cakes here there 😀) I started to lose weight and my knees started to recover.

When I moved back to Lancashire in May 2021, I rekindled my love of the fells and started walking again.  Last year, I set myself the challenge to climb four peaks in the Lake District in four weeks with family, friends and my little dog - Ruby-Hope.  We ended up covering these in 5 weeks due to the lovely British weather 😏  However, in that time we covered Scar Fell, Stickle Tarn, High Hartsop Dodd and Catbells and raised money for "Mind" which is a charity close to my heart.  I was so surprised and encouraged by the amount of support I received and by the reaction to my posts on social media, that I committed to doing something bigger and more life transforming in 2022.   

And that, my friends, is where I am now.  As you can see from what i have written, I am no athlete.  I have no doubt that this challenge will be hard and probably one of the most difficult things I have ever done or ever expected to do in my lifetime.  However, whatever happens, - whatever twists and turns I take along this path - I plan to have fun, live and laugh (at myself, most probably 😂) as much as possible.

Day 1 starts tomorrow... 

As part of this experience, I will be raising funds for the Napthens Foundation -  to provide relief to those in need by reason of education, youth, age, ill-health, disability, financial hardship or other disadvantage and aim to raise £15,000 in the first year.  As part of these fundraising efforts, the foundation has partnered with My Happy Mind, an award winning, ‘profit with purpose’ organisation, who support primary schools on mental health through preventative strategies that give children the skills and tools to thrive.  The benefits to the schools and the children themselves is clear - results to date show a 43% decrease in mental health referrals to the NHS for those schools where the My Happy Mind programme is in place.  You can read more about them here: https://myhappymind.org.  By our fundraising efforts, we aim to support five local schools take advantage of the My Happy Mind programme. 

To donate to this wonderful cause please go to my Sponsor Me Page on:

https://sponsorme.charitiestrust.org/event/f80f9ae6-ffbf-4fd8-b40b-1b82d43a3c26 

FirstBuy – are we looking at another property boom then?

I was interested to see the efforts made by the government this week to move our stalling economy.  The existing FirstBuy scheme, which was originally aimed at first-time buyers, will be extended to include anyone wishing to buy a new-build home.

The “Help to Buy” scheme, which launches on 1 April, will provide shared equity loans of 20% of the property price if purchasers put down a 5% deposit from their own savings. This is much lower than the deposits currently required by banks.

New-build homes must not exceed £600,000 in value in order to qualify for the loans, which will be interest-free for the first five years.

There will also be a new mortgage guarantee, designed to increase the availability of loans to purchasers, which extends the NewBuy Guarantee scheme to include older houses as well as new-builds. Starting in 2014, the scheme will run for three years and will support £130 billion of mortgages.  This is particularly interesting. The question that leaps to my mind is “are we in for another property boom then?  Will we see a huge surge in the housing market?” This attempt to “kick start” the population’s ability to buy new build properties will undoubtedly improve the construction industry which has (dare I say it) been damaged the most in this recession.  I can see it resulting in the further building of properties and the employment of many tradesmen who appear to have suffered most from the particularly grave consequences of this country’s economic downturn.  However, is a property boom really what we all want after what happened to us last time around?  Is this country capable of anything other than “boom” and “bust”?  We’ll see.

My prediction is that we will see the property market begin to pick up because of this scheme.  However, at the end of the 3 years are we destined to plummet to the back of beyond again?  This remains to be seen.  Some may say that the population has become too cynical to risk taking the plunge now.  However, with rental properties having become so expensive and people having waited for years and years to buy property at the “right price” from last time around, there are a lot of people out there just waiting for something like this to happen.

So, on the face of it, this looks like excellent news for all those people who have been desperately trying to raise the stupidly high deposits often required by banks or other lenders. If the measures work in the way that the Government says it intends, this should mean that more people are now able to realise their dream of buying their own property. I am all for that!

Here’s to us taking the next plunge into the unknown!

(....and let us hope we are not in the same position, as we are in now, in another few years).

Starting a Blog - it's got to be easier than Twitter, hasn't it?

This is my first ever blog post.  A bit daunting the first time, I must admit, but I'm up for a challenge and this could just be it.  To be honest, I would liken this first experience to how I felt when I first began using Twitter.  I am now a self confessed addict of all things social media but when I first started using Twitter nothing could have been further from that.

I am not sure whether it is an accepted tradition with newcomers to Twitter, but I must have spent at least twelve months messing about over Twitter before I was finally converted.  I deliberated for months about whether or not to use Twitter at all and when I finally plucked up the courage to send my first tweet I spent a further three months at least trying to fathom out how to work the darn thing.  The time I must have spent staring at the computer screen watching other people chatting away to each other about everything from what they had eaten for breakfast to their views on rising tuition fees for students.  I think the technical term for people who watch activity on Twitter but do not participate is known as "lurking".  After a while I formed the view that my fellow tweeters (if that's the correct description) must either have instinctively known how to use Twitter or have been doggedly determined to conquer it.

Unfortunately, for my part, whilst I really liked the idea of social media and I could see that there were many many people clearly getting a great deal of satisfaction from Twitter I was not patient enough to stick with it in the early days.  In the end I decided to put matters on hold and went back to Facebook.  The turning point happened a couple of Christmases ago.  I got involved with the famous Rage Against the Machine for Xmas Number One campaign.  Admittedly, this was a Facebook campaign and had little to do with Twitter.  What started out as a bit of fun for everyone involved ended in the defeat of the X Factor machine's quest for the coveted Xmas Number One. At the time, I was absolutely glued to my computer tracking the progress of the campaign and I developed the ability to function on very little sleep, sometimes only logging off my computer at five or six in the morning.  I cannot even begin to tell you what an amazing experience this was, how much I learned or how many fantastic and interesting people I met along the way.  Many of these people I am still in touch with.   It was only after the campaign I began to realise just how powerful social media can be - not just as a means of connecting people who might never have become connected had it not been for this technology but in helping people join together to promote positive change.  The possibilities are endless.

So after the campaign I made a conscious effort to have another go at Twitter.  One hundred and ninety million users (or thereabouts) couldn't really be wrong now, could they?  After the initial struggle, I have to say my persistence did eventually pay off.  I now tweet regularly and I have met many more interesting characters.  What has surprised me about Twitter is just how diverse a media it really is.  The real beauty of Twitter is in the empowerment of the user to tap into any news or information as it happens and to spread that news or information around the globe in an instant.  Very often I will turn to Twitter now as a source of  news or information before any other media.  Recently, I have followed the political crisis in Egypt, hearing first hand the views of the Egyptian people on their leadership.  I witnessed the creativity and compassion of the internet generation as they fought to re-connect the Egyptian people to the outside world when their lines to the internet were cut and Al Jazeera were taken off air.  Their government clearly understands the power of social media.  Without Twitter I would never have been this informed.  Television and newspapers are all well and good but you will never get a completely objective view on a news item from those sources.  However, now I can  listen to numerous sources and form my own view on what the true position is.  How liberating is that?

I hear my friends talking about social media and a lot of them are now on Facebook.  Very few of my friends in my social circle tweet.  Some are reluctant to commit to another form of social networking and others simply do not understand how Twitter works and don't think it's worth the effort to learn.  They have Facebook after all.  I beg to differ.  It did take me some twelve months to get my head round how to use Twitter to its full potential but I do not think this was time wasted at all.  I now regularly speak with other lawyers, entrepreneurs, business owners and just about anybody who interests me on a professional or personal level.  I discuss issues which concern me in connection with our business and I have received some quality incisive advice which has changed the way we work.  I have also had a lot of fun in the process.

I started this blog with a degree of trepidation.  Believe it or not, I even worried that I might not be able to think of anything to say.  Honestly, if I can reap even half the rewards from a blog page as I have received from Twitter after investing over twelve months messing around with it, it is fair to say I will be one happy lawyer.