What is a pub crawl anyway?
- Berrak Yedek
- Apr 15
- 5 min read
14.4.2025
Here I am sitting on a typical old desk in the hotel room in Cambridge and it is 8:00 o’clock in the morning, and it is Tuesday. Yes I admit that I am a day late for the blog. Right now I am listening to the steady, not too heavy, but quite present and wet rain falling on to the stone floors and the terrace roof that is in front of the hotel window accompanied by the gentle album Equivalent by AOKI, Hayato and am sipping a peppermint tea.
The sky and the landscape create a very typical and special map of colours, light and smells that I know from a long time ago, when I was studying at Bath University in the UK. I would wake up in my room, which had a wall wide window adjacent to my bed, listening to the rain falling onto the windowsill in a rhythm that only the English rain can create. This morning in Cambridge, where I am for a stopover, it is raining and I am immersed in the memories of my youth. Actually I have dreamt of being on one of the pub crawls, while I was studying in Bath about 34 years ago.
What is a pub crawl?
Well in case you don’t know, it is quite a silly thing, to begin with, from my present perspective. But back then when I was 18, it was the most fun and exciting activity of my Freshman’s year life. We would as a group start in one pub and have a drink and walk to the next, until we had visited all the pubs in Bath. I can assure you there are many. And even if one drank a single drink or beer in each, thinking they would stay reasonable, it would of course transgress all aspects of reason and we would literally crawl back to campus. Of course the way back and getting to bed would be dissolved into oblivion.
So I was dreaming of one of those nights, but I was not in Bath, instead somewhere in England. I was young and full of energy and had funny people around me.
Sensational Memory
Although we know that the body has a memory, and that we keep traces of our experiences in our bodily structures and not only in the brain, I am again and again fascinated how the body makes my brain remember certain experiences so clearly, so palpably.
These past days have been of that sort: on Sunday was Sofia’s 15th birthday (my lovely daughter), and the day before my body’s memory started to swell. Yes I was feeling bloated, with a big belly, the pressure on my organs and pelvis. And in the night I had difficulties breathing and the whole day after my body was reminding me of all sensations of that very day, and the whole birth process was lived through my sensational memory.
We speak a lot about sensational memories in Somatic Dialogue. Not only as in the memory of past life experiences, but also in the way we bridge the experiences made in the sessions. It is a wonderful tool to use to check-in with oneself of what remains of a session, or a dance in our sensational memory. This means that it is not so important to remember exactly in a timeline the actions or exercises we did, but what remained in our sensations, like the aftertaste of an experience.
Trip back into memory
But let me come back to my initial intention of this short blog today. This week I am traveling through England’s east coast from Cambridge to Embelton. And my aim for today is to stop for lunch in Aberford, and then continue to Alnwick, where I’ll be staying for four nights. Each day I will visit Embleton. Now you may ask yourself, why on earth is she doing this and what has it got to do with her writing the so-called Manual?
Well it is absolutely not connected. I had the deep wish of going back to the Northumberland of my teenage years, where I was visiting my beloved ballet teacher Judy Turnbull, who was living in Shirewater Low Mill in Embleton, Nearalnwick. She was there with her husband Tom Turnbull, and they had the most wonderful two black Labradors, who were my companions as I was walking them to Embleton Bay. In the early summer time I would collect raspberries or blackberries along the road and Judy would make jam.
I have lost all contact with Judy, but I will try to find her trace in Embelton. Yes it is romantic, but it makes sense to me somehow. My daughter just turned 15, and I was around her age, when I was visiting her during my holidays and practising in her home studio for my Royal Academy of Dancing exams. And my body leads me there now after 37 years. Who knows what will happen while the sensational memory of that time revives in me… What kind of cycles of my life will close and which may start?
Maybe I will not find her, and only enjoy that magical countryside and the beach with the ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle, while the wind is messing around with my hair, and I let my body revive those days of throwing the tennis ball and the two lovely Labradors running into the sea. Maybe I‘ll go and find some crabs amongst the big round stones…
The body is full of mysteries and leads us sometimes to places we would normally not go back to. I know that this doesn’t make sense, but do we always have to make sense?
Invitation
You know I always liked being in dialogue:) and you dear reader are still very silent. But that is normal. I still imagine you and your reactions. So because it is so, I will invite you this week to look for moments where you can plunge into your sensational memory of your body and just recognize it, acknowledge it and stay with it or let it go. Of course this depends on the quality of your memory.
If it is pleasurable though, I invite you to dance with it for a couple of songs. Transforming it into movement.
Comentários