Reasons to Write No. 4: New Experiences

The Westway Sports Centre

When you write you get to do things you might not have considered.  One such example is my most recent post for West London Living.  Never been turned on by climbing, mainly because I'm scared of heights.  Come to think about it, it might well be a good way to get over that fear.  Bouldering means you don't have to get too far off the ground though.  There were other bouldering virgins when I went to experience the class, so I wasn't too bothered if I cocked it up.  I can think of another good reason to do it too.  If you've always wanted strong muscly arms, I reckon you'd get them after a few sessions on the climbing wall.  Mine have always looked like cheese straws.  If only there was a way to get great arms by keyboard bashing.

Writing this feature also opened up a bit of my community for me.  It's been a long winter in England (I write that because I've noticed a lot of you are reading from other countries) and Christmas left me skint, so I hadn't been out much.  My drug of choice is TV and it's lethal to me.  Whole evenings can pass when I haven't thought about what else I could do with my life or how I could use that time to learn something.  Unlike my living room, the local recreation centre was swarming with people.  There were several six a side football matches going on outside, about the same number of tennis matches happening in the warm and who knows how many exercise classes taking place around the enormous space under the Westway (a kind of freeway for those of you reading from the US).  It felt like a party was going on that I'd never previously been invited to.  So that's where everyone was.  So even though I wasn't getting paid, I saw a side of London I'd never seen before.