Thursday 15 May 2014

Clare Balding's Visit and Interview on Monday 12th May 2014



At 2PM on Monday 12th May 2014 in a deep rumbling giant Jaguar sports car, Clare Balding and her producer, Karen Gregor arrived in the midst of our woods to welcoming birdsong and sunshine bursting through our woodland glade.

They came to interview me while walking through the woods down to the River Wye, the Biblins, across the swing bridge to Symonds Yat East, to rest at The Saracens Head.  All this for the BBC Radio 4 Ramblings programme, which will be broadcast on Thursday 19th June at 3PM and on the following Saturday at 6AM.

Why would such a prestigious lady who presented the Olympics and Paralympics, and the Badminton Horse trials and many more programmes want to interview an ordinary person like me?  Well, it's not how I planned it!

My "calling" for lack of a better word, is to help the Public find their own self-healing powers through a system I discovered while busy healing myself from severe osteo-arthritis which resulted in two metal hips.  This system is now trademarked and called "True to our Roots Qi Gong".

In order to share this magical system with the public I decided to run a free walking group, on the Doward, called The Doward Masai walkers!  Bringing our awareness back to our posture and breath while absorbing the beauty of our environment.  At present I am running a study on how to maintain replacement hips for the rest of our earthly life with a group of volunteers who all have one or two artificial hips, with the same goal in mind.

One of my clients suggested I got in touch with the Ramblings programme which is what I did, and after a long phonecall from Karen Gregor, the programme's producer, last Monday became the surreal afternoon of our interview!  My initial idea was to involve The Doward Masai walkers, but after Karen asked me a lot of personal questions, they decided they only wanted to interview me by myself!

To be honest, I have no idea of much that I said, and was so grateful that they asked my husband, Roger Smith, to accompany us, as he is a mine of information regarding our environment, especially as he is our local Parish Council's Footpath Officer!

The walk turned out to be a real adventure, which I won't reveal any more, as you will have to listen to the programme when it'll be aired!!  All I can add is that I was very lucky to be able to give Clare a little impromptu treatment, so she had a little taster of the work I do!