Keeping up ones pecker in five easy steps...

Or where to find a happy place when you have lost yours...!!!


I have been tagged, quite unexpectedly and out of the blue, from someone out there in the big bad world, and it could not have come at a better or more appropriate time because I have been a real nightmare of a Madame Grognonne lately! For which to all whom it may concern I am very very sorry...honestly..








This isn’t a tag for listing how clever you are or how well travelled or how bizarre you are or who you know who is famous, or your 7 most favourite films. It is a really helpful tag about what you do to keep try and keep your pecker up and stay positive so here goes!!We all have our coping strategies or what ever you want to call them so here are mine to deal with that old black mongrel of depression. This is what I do if I am feeling a touch of “Le Cafard” as the French say ….or rather what I know I should do but don't always do well enough...




1 Dredge up a memory of a happy moment. If I remind myself how very happy I felt and recapture it, I know I can feel that way again...and that fact makes me smile. Think of one small thing that made you smile, and you watch along will come another, and another and another…They are like London Buses…




2 Do something, anything, iron, clean, cook, sort through a mountain of paper work, blitz the kids bedrooms, or weed the veggie patch. Even better, go and do something for someone else. What goes around comes around, and some of the most incredible people I have met, I met through getting off my bottom and going out to give someone a hand. Activity takes my mind of me.




3 Play Carl Orff ‘s “Carmine Burana” very loud or the sound tracks of South Pacific or Oklahoma or something with so much life and energy stuffed into it that it is pouring out of the seams. If the Wombles do it for you, go for it!




4 Walk and walk and walk, and look around me and remind myself how incredible the world is and how much out there I do not even know about yet. You can do that anywhere inner city shopping centre, out on a lone moor on a train, but do be careful if you do it when you are driving!!!




5 stop feeling so self indulgently sorry for myself and start remembering how lucky I am. How lucky I am to get to be the age I am, living where I am, and not dying of Aids in some hovel in Africa, or watching my children die of starvation in some worn torn God forsaken place, or many of the myriad things I am lucky not to have experienced.





Yes bad things happen in life but I can make the choice to leave them behind or I can sit and go over and over and over them. As the French say C’est Fini. Now move on.



It is clichéd but its true, most peoples lives are as happy as they want them to be, you can either decide everything is terrible and sit and list all the things that make you miserable and wallow in it or pump up the volume and concentrate on the positive things and all the things you have achieved .



And if you don’t feel you have achieved anything, look again. If you are reading this, then you can read, millions can't, if you are having this read to you then you are lucky to have someone who has taken the time to do that for you.




If you blog, then you can write and have access to a computer, many have neither access or skill or opportunity. No one made you do any of those things. It was your choice so now go and look in the mirror and remind yourself of how marvelous life is and how extremely lucky you are.



And on a final note, we are not talking Bipolar disorder or clinical depression here we are talking about the odd touch of the blues, the sort of thing that comes form having too much time on ones hands and over indulging in poor me syndrome. So there you are I have passed on the Baton.. on to Pondside, Fennie, Grouse, ChrisH. and Snailbeachshepherdess..go girls run like the wind!!!

The wonderful illustration I can not find artist or title for but it just sums up the whole keep going up and don't look back thing, start looking down and you end up frozen with fear , like Dory in Finding Nemo you just have to keep on swimming...oh and for anyone reading my blog for the first time, welcome ,and the funny stuff is under the adventures of un peu loufoque this is the other side of me... ...and lastly but by no means least a very big thank you to American Scot for tagging me...