My posts are all to amuse and are fiction, sometimes inspired by my life.

 My posts are all to amuse and are fiction, sometimes inspired by my life. I often exaggerate to make things fun. All my advice is just my opinion and not intended as expert advice.

Thank you, Kirsteen

Recovering from Illness with Art.

 Press Release:

Silver Shell Jewellery

Recovering from Illness with Art.

Silver Shell Jewellery is the new business of designer / maker Kirsteen Lyons-Benson BA (Hons) born out of a desperate year of illness and lockdown it’s finding the shine in life again. www.silvershell.art

“I know my story is be no means unique. So many people have had a really unthinkable year. My family and I all caught corona in early March and I nursed the while household and worked hard while unwell. I was also volunteering on a helpline and listening to terrified old ladies locked in and unable to get food or help. The stress and illness took hold and I got long covid and have been unwell for a year. The government have been worse than useless restrictions and fear making future hope and recovery harder to achieve.

I am a textile designer and crated fabric designs for a studio in Europe but it is a shrinking industry and lockdowns have made it much worse, two billion pounds worth of fashion has been cancelled from Bangladesh alone this year. I was lost for a future.

I grew up in a craft pottery and my mum and I used to have a pottery together, my mum stated a new pottery in the garage during lockdown it has been her project keeping her creating and hopeful. I stated making pottery again and really enjoying it when I was strong enough. I remembered all my clay and modelling skills I have developed since a child. I also remembered that I had heard there was a clay made of silver you could sculpt into jewellery instead of more traditional methods. I have wanted to try it years ago but time had not permitted. Well the one thing you have while recovering from illness is time.

I watched some you tube tutorials and ordered some materials, I made simple things and experiments, some broke, some melted! I watched more tutorials I tried again, some worked. It became my passion, little bright objects emerging from the flames made me happy and hopeful about the future again.

The lockdown has been painful for so many people and I’m so glad it is ending. I hope my jewellery gives others the same feelings of renewed hope that designing and making it has given me.” Kirsteen

About Silver Shell Jewellery:

One off, original, contemporary silver jewellery. Handmade by Artist and designer Kirsteen Lyons-Benson BA (Hons).

Every piece is a little artwork, they are not made by machine, they are hand made by me one at a time. They are each given my love and create and attention.

These pieces are made by sculpting “metal clay” which is metal and a tiny amount of organic material, then I heat the hardened clay (with a blowtorch) to burn away the organic material leaving only silver metal behind. I then hand polish this to a shine. Hand made products from natural materials will always have slight differences one to another. I think this is part of the charm but it’s possible your jewellery will not be identical to the one photographed.

I have been creating art all my life, starting out with clay in my parents pottery when I was four years old, I have spent a lifetime learning to sculpt and paint and design. I create these pieces because I love to, I hope you enjoy owning them as much as I enjoy making them.

“When you make something unique you advance the culture, it’s not like owning something mass produced, that’s just repeating what came before, you own a little piece of the future. Art is life, art is peace, art is purpose, it’s worthwhile to support that in all of us.”

About Kirsteen the artist and designer:

Kirsteen Lyons-Benson is the child of two artists who met at Glasgow art school in the sixties, got married, and fled the city to a remote Scottish island, to live on a beach, in a tent, with two kittens and a chest of drawers!

Growing up in a craft pottery, and later a cottage in the woods, Kirsteen planned to rebel, and have central heating and breakdown cover when she grew up!

Grow up she did, and studied textile design, not fine art (more rebellion). She did very well at university winning two prestigious competitions and getting a job with a wallpaper manufacturer straight out of uni, it was new product development, so she went from there to other innovation companies and tried all sorts of middle class ideas out, including paying a mortgage, and working in PR, but soon found her parents were correct - they are very overrated ideas.

Kirsteen tried selling paintings on-line, London markets, starting and running a craft fair, starting a gallery and pottery, starting and running a face painting business, and finally returned to textile design to freelance from home, and be mum to a daughter and a son. Throughout this she has always taught art and created her own paintings.

After designing fashion fabrics for for a few years, she made the switch back to interior fabrics and wallpaper and signed with a design house in Europe.

For two years she created a drawing every day, just for the art of it, practice, effective relief from parenting and simply because it makes her happy. So many people were inspired, uplifted and delighted and wrote to her telling her that her art project had made them return to art, that she wanted to carry the movement forward somehow, the idea for her book stated there.

After the book Jewellery became the passion of the future for Kirsteen. Her love for style, fashion, nature, clay and shine all came together in a perfect art form. All her previous artforms and experience inform her jewellery design and creation, in a wholly unique blend.

She has now fully come to terms with her hippy origins and feels she belongs in middle class suburban England like a Bengal tiger belongs on a water slide! For this reason Kirsteen spent two winters travelling Spain and Portugal in a series of beat up camper vans with her kids and blogging about it. All her underfunded and ill-planned adventures have widened her experience and raised her courage, but most of all taught her the world has a bright and hopeful face as well as a dark one, and that face of hope can be reflected in the art in our lives, what is more it should be for all our sakes.

More artwork can be found at:

www.kirsteen.art

www.unquit.art

Kirsteen

Silver Shell Jewellery

#art #peace #live #create #aesthetic #happiness #purpose #kirsteenart #jewellery #silver #shell #silvershell

Algave tour with my big girl

 Jasmine and I did an amazing tour of the most historic parts of the algarve today, here are some of the more quirky things we learned:

Long before the British or Spanish had empires, the Portuguse sailed to OZ and brought back eucalyptus trees, but it was a bad choice as now they are often the cause of forest fires!

Storks mate for life and migrate back to the exact nest every year, for this reason it is illegal to destroy anything a stork nests on in Portugal. There are sites in Lagos where whole factories have been torn down except two chimneys because they have nests on!

The tiny orange variety of the algarve is both sweet and juicy, but you can't get it anywhere else in Europe because it's bellow European Union regulation orange size so it can only be sold locally!

Lagos has the site of the oldest slave market in Europe but Portugal was also an early adopter of abolition. First in, first out!

Kayaking with my big girl

 Out on the bay in a kayak feeling like you have the sea to yourself! Jumping off the boat into the water and having so much fun with my big girl! She's so brave! I'm so proud of her. They gave me a waterproof tub for my camera phone and I had to unlash it from the kayak to take a picture then try not to drop it in the sea with my freezing hands! So I just took this one picture. Plus some of us before and after. #lovehomeschool #loveworldschool

Corona, Media and Taking Sides.

 Corona, Media and Taking Sides.

I feel I want to write something about taking sides. I feel like we are more polarised recently. Are you Trump or anti? Are you pro or anti mask? Are you vaccine or not? Which side are you on? Are you pro or anti China because someone may or may not have eaten a bat! This is polarisation, you have to be one extreme or another and the other side are wrong, the bad guys, stupid or even enemy. Don’t like Greta, say she’s mad!

I was recently told I am Sikh, I was told that the three main things that make a Sikh are truth, faith and service to humanity, as I am these things, I am Sikh (I have always been a Scientologist) but this wonderful inclusiveness literally made me cry. I am now proud to be Sikh, but this does not polarise me away from my Muslim friends, nor my agnostic ones. Indeed this does not polarise me away from my political left friends nor the right.

Politics recently and especially in the pandemic has been very polarised, you don’t like masks, then you must be in this whole camp and stupid too! With social media and air travel, and the internet we can connect so widely around the world and into communities we would not have known existed. I have a potter friend in the USA I met on Facebook by mistake. We share children’s book recommendations. I watch master kimono makers in Japan like I’m in their studio on Youtube. My friend from Kazakstan stays in touch via instagram, I think pre internet we would have lost touch after she left the UK…there is so much opportunity to make everyone on your side.

The dangerous thing about taking sides is you then need a side to go away to and be separate. So if kids pick sides then they say, our side is the half of the garden with the tree and you have the side with the flower bed, and you can have a snowball fight or ignore each other. All good. But there is only so much garden and at the end of the day we are all in it.

What is a closed system? A closed system is when you recycle everything around and around. Like a little space station with four people in it. No new stuff comes in so they recycle air, water etc. Imagine if these four people chose to polarise, the two people who believe in the tooth fairy against the crazy ones! Imagine then if the tooth fairy team set their own limits on use of resources and the crazy ones do too - without consulting each other! It is a doomed closed system, and very fast too. What if crazy side send a bomb to tooth fairy team? No closed system.

Well a planet is a closed system too. It’s not so noticeable because it’s quite big and complicated and has lots of languages and mountains and tennis courts and hot dogs, but it is a closed system too. Not much leaves and not much comes in. And if you let off enough bombs in one end the other end will suffer. Don’t like refugees coming to your rich country? don’t crate wars for them to flee! Don’t like poor people taking your wealth? Look for solutions to 1 percent of the planet owning 99 percent of the wealth. It’s a closed system, one garden, one space-station, one SIDE!!!!! You can’t afford to take sides!!!!

We need to communicate more with one another, we need to transcend polarisation and forge links, try to understand the other team, if you can’t at least respect them. The media and those who profit by chaos and war will always forward polarisation. You are in one team or another they say. You are with me or against me. Look what THEY did? Be outraged!!!! The truth is if you don’t like someone’s idea it’s their idea you don’t like, that does not make them your enemy. So speak out against their idea - don’t call them your enemy. Don’t call them crazy, don’t attack the person or group.

There are good ideas in every political spectrum, look for them, support them, look for what really helps. I don’t think anyone should go against their personal integrity and do what they feel is wrong, but a wrong policy is not always a symptom of an enemy. Ignore the rules you don’t agree with or speak out against them, that’s not the same as slandering the person who made the rule. Try to understand. Seek to be one team.

Corona restrictions have isolated us from human contact, cut down our travel and made our friends and family harder to see in person. So we are seeing our world through our screens. Don’t let that isolation colour your view of the world. What you see from the media and on your screens is a fear driving version of the world, a worsened picture meant to drive forward hysteria and polarisation for the profit of a few. The world is mostly a very friendly place, people are kind, towns and villages are safe, life goes on as normal mostly.

So this was a long rant in which I got a little over excited. I don’t mean to try to say I’m better than anyone else or perfect, nor am I trying to point fingers. I just wanted to offer the idea that we are all on one side and that picking sides inside a closed system does not have infinite workability.

I hope my thoughts are helpful to someone.

Love, Kirsteen

(The pic is me at the tomb of Marko Polo in Saville)

This is the summer of gratefulness.

This is going to be a summer where people are grateful.

They will start out “Moan, moan, government, money, moan, traffic, moan..” Then they will stop and say “But Thank goodness it’s not lockdown any more, thank goodness we got through the pandemic ok.”

A lot of people are going to reach for goals they had long ago abandoned, happiness that had been tagged “unlikely” or “unrealistic” in stuck minds. They are going to say “I could have died, or been locked away forever, I better really live the life I might have had snatched away early!” And “I just found out what is really important and it was not jet washing my driveway after all!”

I think this will cause a spiritual, creative and environmental resurgence and a lessening of materialistic goals.

I think we are entering a bright future.

Artists website www.kirsteen.art

I have launched a new website to view, like, share and buy my art!

See it here:
https://www.kirsteen.art

Original artwork by Kirsteen Lyons-Benson (BA Hons)
Mixed media on paper.

Kirsteen Lyons is the child of two artists who met at Glasgow art school in the sixties, got married, and fled the city to a remote Scottish island, to live on a beach, in a tent, with two kittens and a chest of drawers.

Growing up in a craft pottery, and later a cottage in the woods, Kirsteen planned to rebel, and have central heating and breakdown cover when she grew up!

Grow up she did, and studied textile design, not fine art (more rebellion). She did very well at university winning two prestigious competitions and getting a job with Muraspec (a wallpaper manufacturer) straight out of uni, it was new product development, so she went from there to other innovation companies,
and tried all sorts of middle class ideas out, including paying a mortgage, and working in PR, but soon found her parents were correct - they are very overrated ideas.

Kirsteen tried selling paintings on line, London markets, starting and running a craft fair, starting a gallery and pottery, starting and running a face painting business, and finally returned to textile design to freelance from home, and be mum to a daughter and a son.

After designing fashion fabrics for Amanda Kelly Design Studios for a few years, she has recently made the switch back to interior fabrics and wallpaper and signed with an established and prestigious studio in Europe.

She has now fully come to terms with her hippy origins and feels she belongs in middle class suburban England like a Bengal tiger belongs on a water slide! For this reason Kirsteen spent the last two years travelling Spain, France and Portugal on a camper van!

Kirsteen creates original paintings inspired by nature and travel. She has painted and designed all her life, at no time is she more herself than with brush in hand, or a sticky juice carton and shoes belonging to her kids! 😂💙🎨✏️

Contact info:
Kirsteen Lyons (BA Hons)
+44 7799201417
kirsteenann@gmail.com
Facebook:
https://m.facebook.com/KirsteenBenson
Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/artdreamsgallery

Youtube:
https://m.youtube.com/user/kirsteenartwork/videos

Blogs:

Art:
http://createadrawingaday.blogspot.co.uk

Textile design:
http://enchantedtextiledesign.blogspot.co.uk

Read about my travel and some artwork:
http://feelcreaterepeat.blogspot.com

Kids art projects:
http://artistmummy.blogspot.co.uk

KIRSTEEN LYONS BA (HONS) CV

KIRSTEEN LYONS BA (HONS)

Recent Freelance:

Currently founding: Art Dreams Gallery. An online gallery bringing together the work of four professional artists to sell original paintings and some prints. https://www.etsy.com/shop/ArtDreamsGallery

2013 to present. Freelance as Enchanted Textile Design. Creating high quality design for a series of textile studioes in New York, London and Europe. Currently designing furnishing fabrics which are sold to clients throughout Europe. http://enchantedtextiledesign.blogspot.com

2006 to 2009 Started and ran Bagsythat pottery and Gallery in Tilgate Park, Crawley. A small pottery and Gallery providing handmade ceramics, teaching, painting and children's activities.

2008 to 2013 Started, ran and eventually sold Crawley Craft Fair. A vibrant community event and a viable small business. (I also advised on the founding of Crawley Book Fair.)

2008 to 2013 Started and ran Butterfly Facepainting. Butterfly Facepainting was a successful and creative Facepainting business with up to four facepainters freelancing under my management.

Competitions:

2001 First prize-winner of an industrial competition for Morton Yong & Borland. This was a prize for the best of Madras lace design and involved one week’s work placement gaining first-hand experience of designing Madras lace converting it into a suitable format for the computerised loom and seeing it woven. I was also involved in preparations for a trade fair the company were attending.

2001 Joint first prize-winner of an industrial competition for Muraspec, (a textile wall coverings design and manufacturer). The judges of this competition said I had won for the relevance and applicability of my response to the brief as well as the high standard of work, commenting “There are people out there making good livings with far inferior products”.

Qualifications:

1999-2002 BA (Hons) Textile Design 2(1). Involving; print, weave, knit, marketing, finance, management, coloration Technology, print technology, visual studies, professional practice, CAD and the design process. Also being entered into the Royal Society of Arts textile competition.

A level art, A level photography, Several GCSE's.

Work history:

2007 to 2008 teaching English as a second language at Greenfields English language school.

2006 Freelance Graphic design and fine art. Selling paintings online and at fairs.

2004-2005 Graphic Design and PR. Star Syringe. This involved web updates, Newsletters, brochures and press articles. During my time at Star Syringe I instigated many press articles including national radio interviews and national newspapers. I was also instrumental in winning several award for the Business including the Sussex Business awards and Best international Company at the Stivies. (International Bussiness awards baced in the US, This put us on US TV.) See www.starsyringe.com for more detail.

2003 Freelance Murals and wedding stationary.

2002 Associate, Product development. Muraspec. (Kent) This involved lending my textiles knowledge to the team, research, planning, lab work and CAD design for 3D weave.

1996-1999 Art and drama teacher at Greenfields school, (Sussex). In addition to teaching lessons this involved assisting with school plays, attending moderation meetings, parents’ evenings, planning lessons, keeping admin, supervision duties around the school, writing reports and communicating with parents about the progress their children made.

1996-2001 Theatre Design and production. (Sussex) I have designed and created; costumes, props, scenery and backdrops for several theatre productions as well as acting, coaching and directing.

1998-1999 Commissions to paint murals. (Sussex and Kent).

2001 Work placement with The Printed Stitch Studio Design Consultants. (Galashiels) During my time in Printed Stitch, I worked on two main design projects. The first was compiling ideas to employ textile art in a shopping mall in Edinburgh. I’d also worked on designing their new promotion mail and business card.

Volunteer Work:

2014 and 2015 Executive director of Saint Hill Arts Festival.

Vacation Work:

1997 Director of exhibitions for St Hill arts festival, (Sussex). This position involved receiving the artists and their work, acting as their hostess throughout the festival and seeing that the artwork was hung in a suitable space to the artist’s specifications.

1996 Director of the Children's Project for St Hill arts festival, (Sussex). This involved the advanced planning of a week’s activities in the arts for children of all ages, ordering relevant materials, and recruiting a voluntary staff to assist. In addition to these responsibilities, I personally delivered many of the activities.

1995 Summer school, (Sussex). Organising and delivering one week of art activities for 7 to 16 year-olds. Under the umbrella of the school where the summer school was taking place I was responsible for planning, ordering materials and delivering the activities.

Exhibitions:

1999 and 2000 Exhibitions of oil paintings with two other artists, (East Grinstead Art Centre).

2002 Exhibition at the Lighthouse Design Centre, (Glasgow).

2002 Degree show exhibition (Galashiels)

2002 New Designers, Islington exhibition centre (London)

2002 Now Gallery of contemporary art

2006 East Grinstead Arts Center

2007 East Grinstead Arts Center.

2008 Crawley Library Exhibition Space.

Other:

1992-1995 Wirral Youth Theatre member.

1993-1995 Wirral Youth Service Travel Panel rep. At monthly meetings myself and some other youth reps from the Liverpool area reviewed suggestions from the various youth groups in the district. Funding and assistance was allocated largely on our recommendations.

2000 Class rep. Textile Design, Heriot-Watt University.

2001-2002 Member of the Textile Design Society Heriot-Watt University.

2001 Photographic commission for hotel website, (Jedburgh).

Email for references:

kirsteenann@gmail.com

Campervan designs and maps...where next.

Where will we go next and how might we get there?

In between trips around this part of Portugal have been obsessively drawing campervan ideas and and looking at maps. When you stand on a pristinely empty beach with your kids running out across the sand like deer, one thought takes hold,
"How can we do more of this in the future?"

I'm keen to explore my native Scotland and Wales (which has more castles per square mile than any other country in the world!) I've also always had a thing about North Devon. My daughter is desperate to spend time in Paris, we have passed through but not explored.

Looking at the French road map I never realized how well connected we are with France....

We need a Britstop book, to sleep free and legal in the UK, and Aires book for France, and a van, car turned into camper... Here following are my ideas.

Portugal: Ideas and Impressions.

Portugal: Impressions and ideas.

I'm sitting in the main street in Quarteira, in The Algarve, in Portugal. Is a little scruffy. A Christmas fair has been running on and off for a few days and they have put read carpet all down the street, which is now rather dirty! A busker is singing a mix of the usual busker hits, like, “American Pie” and something I assume is Portuguese, but it's a really hard language to pick up and I learned more Spanish, Italian and German in 24 hours than I have Portuguese in a month - sorry.

A few moments ago a man walked by with a bucket of half alive octopus. There are lots of bikes and scooters, cars are hard to afford here. Portugal is pretty poor and pretty sparsely populated. Lots of people don't have jobs, however many of them are not unemployed, they live off small plots of family owned land, growing most of their food and bartering a bit more. Even in the town lots of bits of verge or unused land has been adopted by householders and turned into stretches of vegetable garden.

There are many empty show and decaying buildings but also little friendly business almost always kept very clean, even if their stuff is a bit old and scuffed it is usually wiped, maintained and polished. It shows a short of self respect which is typical of the almost poverty of many here. They don't act down on their luck, they act happy, friendly, community minded - without much wealth. Up the street a young woman and a weathered old lady have been dancing to the busker while minding empty stalls, at the end of the song they embrace and go back to work, see what I mean?

There are also many empty apartment buildings - I saw this in Spain too. Row upon row of holiday flats empty nine months of the year. I may a man who owned one and worked in London, he moved to Portugal but before that had owned it ten years and spent one month total in it. I did last them on my bike, and passed the building sites throwing up more and think, can't we share them out somehow? I'm not socialist, I do think you should benefit from hard work but surely a system could be worked out to learn them out to displaced families or something? I don't know but it seems so sad that people are sleeping in the doorways of 100 empty little fully functional apartments!

The coast and the countryside, the history and the wildlife are wonderful here, feasting on being surrounded by so much differentness.

Love, Kirsteen

A Life Less Stationarity.

A Life Less Stationarity.

So yesterday was a huge landmark in all our lives, l taught my daughter to skip stones across the water so they bounce a few times before sinking! OK, it's ridiculous to call that a huge landmark, but then again is it? It's only eight years until she's an adult, how much we can miss of our children's lives of we let other people bring them up? And how much can they miss of their own lives if they spend six hours a day in a room with twenty-nine other kids writing stuff down for twelve years! I know many schools are very good and most teachers well-intentioned, but can we really call that a good education? What if they also spend their free time on screens? We are the generation replacing going and doing, with clicking and viewing. I'm not saying it's all bad, my daughter has become a fluent reader reading comics on YouTube in the absence of books in English! A wonderful future innovation! I guess I'm looking for balance. I'm trying to skip a stone across the surface of technology without sinking out of sight of the sunlight!

So there is also a narrative, we are travelling around Spain and Portugal in a campervan, to find adventure, experience, history, culture and a lot of sand! The last time I wrote in any detail we had made it to Santiago de Compostela and were staying in a hotel while broken down!

I'm now in a campsite in southern Portugal where we plan to sell the van and stay in a campsite but until spring. How did this happen? Well, we fixed the van in Santiago and set of South again in some of the worst weather we've seen in these parts, rain and flooding, rain on the roads coming from six directions! We got to Tui and stopped at the aire (free, camper only stop, which is basically a car park with a tap and a drain). The rain cleared and the kids and I took a walk.

Tui: I think Tui is my happy place! A perfect, tiny city, high on a hill with constant views of the wide blue river.

Porto: Porto is like London and Florence had a baby who got all the best features from both parents, add cable cars and trams too! It seems like a hundred thousand red roofs climb the hills from the river and no two the same shape!

Sao Mamede: We arrived in torrents of rain, everything was damp and our damp coats brought more wet into the van, keeping the door open was impossible, everyone huddled in the van on screens, everyone was freezing and board. I read it's a beautiful part of Portugal but the rain never let up and we left for more exhausting driving through minimal visibility. People we met were friendly and helpful, places were clean, if sometimes a bit scruffy from age, as I have found throughout Northern Spain and Portugal.

Fatima: Some point after Sao Mamede we broke down again, losing power on the long hills that characterize driving in Portugal (the big trucks frequently get down to 30 kilometres per hour!). A gentleman stopped to help us and ended up spending the whole day driving us around to garage and town, my son referred to him as a taxi! Fatima is odd, the whole town exists because some children had a vision of the Virgin Mary there. The pope has visited recently and the town is littered with statues of him, every shop sells statues of Mary and religious souvenirs, also wax body parts to bring the virgin as gifts if you require them healing! My daughter and I found wax hearts and intestinal tracts a bit macabre. If any of you would like me to bring you a wax spleen, say the word! There is no actual community there, just souvenir shops, hotels and churches!

All mankind has the right to celebrate their faith as they see fit, but personally, I felt real awe walking in the pilgrim's footsteps to the cathedral at Santiago de Compostela and Fatima left me unmoved.

The garage at Fatima said my van needed a new engine and it would cost five thousand euros! The people at my breakdown cover were not convinced and we agreed to ship it South to a garage recommended by a Facebook friend!

Vilamoura: we took the train to Vilamoura and the van got a piggyback on a breakdown truck! The van was picked up on a Tuesday in Fatima but did not join us in southern Portugal until Friday! No one knows what she did while of on her own, if she turns out to be pregnant there is a waiting list for the little campervan! We took the train, which was less than a hundred euros for a family of four to travel first class halfway down the country! The train station cafe was a dead ringer for 1977!

Vilamoura is beautiful but the old town is so manicured and populated by English and Germans that it is indistinguishable from the hotels and golf course! Tourism gone mad, visit Portugal and miss the whole culture.

We went from staying in the four seasons, with four swimming pools and a spa (on the breakdown insurance) to sleeping in the broken van on the garage four-court in lashing rain by a busy road when the breakdown insurance ran out! Seldom has such contract been part of my experience! But the same Facebook friend came and took us ice-skating in a glittering mall!

Quartarteira: The new quote was for a fuel pump was a thousand euros, but after the previous breakdown and way too much eating out because the freezing wet van was no fun, we didn't have it.

We patched the van up and drove it to a campsite in Quartarteira. It's along the beach from Vilamoura and joined together, like Brighton and Hove if there was fourteen miles of sandy beach and spiders the size of fifty pence pieces and the colour of the sun!

The lady at the campsite explained it to me like this, “Up that end they lie in the sun beside their villas, this end we work!” she chuckled quite cheerfully about that, clearly a woman who understands that no happiness has ever been found by doing nothing!

We arrived at the campsite, after two months on the road in a basic van, two breakdowns and a month of rain, every scrap of clothing was dirty, everyone was dirty, we were down to a handful of euros and dead tired.

We washed out clothing and bedding, charged our devices and made a plan, sell the van and rent a hut with a shower and flushing loo! Here we will stay until spring, no longer meandering around the coast visiting every village and bay, but it's beautiful here and we will explore and learn.

I've figured out the smart way to have come here, flights from the UK are very cheap and the campsite hut is six hundred euros the first month but only three thereafter. We could have flown Gatwick to Faro for about £50 each! (half an hour in a taxi each side) and rented a hut, skipped the rain, saved a fortune, never slept in a garage, never been boxed in, never arrived to sleep at an aire and found it shut, never broke down, never been tearful or lost and driving in circles.

But who wants to skip life, we would have never stood in improbably silent streets, awed by the vast churches, met heroes in nowhere places, chanced on stunning bridges and empty beaches! High fived at working out the toll booths! Inspired our friends and strangers met, tested our courage and communication skills. You don't want to skip over life, that's not an education!

Love Kirsteen