The Ugly Side of Exercise

I don't know about you, Reader, but I've been feeling a bit ragey this week. Moody, furious, tearful, depressed and very, very angry. Lockdown is taking its toll, as is the clock change - always a bit jet-lag-inducing at the best of times and this is not the best of times!
We all know that exercise is good for us, especially when it comes to counteracting rage, but is it really so good? When you think about exercise, do you think about a svelte, serene woman doing tree pose (Vrikshasana)? 

Me and my bestie, doing Yoga in simpler times...

Or some hench guy doing speedy press ups as effortlessly as a cat, batting a plastic ball on a string?

What about the rest of us sweaty proletarians, lumbering around in an ungainly manner? Not so shiny and pretty now, is it?

I won’t lie to you, friends, my sports bra heralds from leaner, sportier times. Times when I used to go running and do aerobics classes and, gasp, belonged to a gym! Circumferences have changed over the years, I haven’t seen fit to get measured for a new sports bra, because, until recently, the most athletic thing I've done these days is walk up some stairs at work. However, now I've started to leap around in the mornings to Joe Wicks, I find that I have to wear that ancient piece of restrictive lingerie (the sports bra) and it leaves an ugly red ridge around my torso. It cuts in something chronic but I can’t not wear one - wearing a normal bra means that the aerodynamics are all wrong. I won’t go into details other than it proved too distracting for the other poor members of my family, so the next day I turned up in full gear - running shorts, singlet and armour plated, ugliest-garment-in-the-history-of-garments, sports bra. 

But it’s not about what I looked like, right, it’s about how the exercise made me feel. And how did it make me feel? On the first day, brilliant. Subsequent days, quite good but perhaps not so good and also quite ashamed - ashamed of being terrible at squats and push-ups and planks, but also entertaining the rather optimistic hope of coming out the end of it as a master of all these things - the plank queen! All hail The Queen of Planks!!

Green Eyed monster

We need to talk about ‘Just Dance’, ‘Let’s Dance’, ‘Time to dance’ or whatever the bland, forgettable name of this game (on the PS 4 and many other platforms) is. It should be the most fun thing ever and it sort of is. Sort of.  But it also isn’t and, for me, this is because of the competitive element of it. Dearest reader, something strange has happened - my husband, who I’m sure he won’t mind me saying, is not an amazing dancer*, is really good at ‘Just Dance’ and keeps beating me at it. It’s not that I mind being beaten (much) it’s more that I just want to enjoy the music and move without being judged on how well I’m completing the moves. Just let me dance, Just Dance, just let me dance!
* Update - he does mind me saying!

It’s not just that though, that’s not my only niggle. As I sat there the other night, watching a play on my laptop, like the true intellectual I am, my husband wiggled his neat, compact little bottom to a Shania Twain song, right in front of me. 

Husband - getting his groove on!

Oh no, I thought, he’s going to emerge at the end of this period of isolation, social distancing, whatever, looking all buff and hot and hench and I am going to look like the librarian from the Blade film franchise!

Day 91 of self-isolation

He’s leaving me behind! This just will not do. This is the true ugly side of exercise, the unattractive, insecure, competitive side of it! 

Try it at your peril.

The Isolation Diaries

Dear Reader,

It's been a while, hasn't it? I couldn't write anything for a long time for personal reasons and then there was - well, you know, the thing we're all going through at the moment - pandemic, social isolation, lock-down. 

Like most people, the whole situation drove fear into my heart. All this talk of virtual museum tours and binge watching box sets on Netflix did nothing to allay my fears of the suffocating feeling of being buried alive. BUT, but it hasn't been quite as bad as I feared. I do realise that I'm lucky - I have my family around me and, although we don't have a proper garden, we have been able to get out to the park most days, for a good old, 2 metres away from other zombies, walk. We have enough to eat, (fingers crossed) we are well and my husband and I are able to work from home. So I do realise how fortunate we are, compared to others.

What have I done in these isolated times? I haven't learned a language, taught myself how to make origami animals or cleared out any junk but I have kept the wolves at bay by keeping (a little bit) busy. So here is a mainly visual diary of the last few days:

Cooking

I've been doing far more of it - not particularly photogenic stuff but a vegetable curry, a Bolognese and some soup. My husband made bread the other day which looked and tasted amazing but he can put a picture of that in his own blog! Here is my soup:

That soup had everything in it - lentils, roasted red peppers, smoked paprika, vegetable bouillon, onion (of course!). My kids are quite fussy eaters but they will eat most things if they've been blended into an unrecognisable mush so the soup was a 2 day, resounding success. Shame I didn't do that for the Bolognese or curry really...Anyway, I've got us on wartime rations* and as a consequence I am permanently hungry but I do find that I'm appreciating the taste of things much ore so perhaps after a few weeks of this the children will be begging for some of  that vegetable curry...

*Please be assured that I'm not starving my children - everyone has enough to eat, snacks are factored in - both healthy and 'unhealthy' but I felt the need to impose some kind of regime in order to stop the constant bird squawk of 'I'm hungry!' - Me, this is mostly me doing the squawking! :)

Exercise

The aforementioned almost daily walks to the park, we are very lucky to live within walking distance of this. The kids don't appreciate this yet but maybe they will:

A deer - self isolating

We've also been doing daily P.E with the lovely Joe Wicks:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyCLoPd4VxBvQafyve889qVcPxYEjdSTl

It's really hard! My poor, dough-like body doesn't know what's hit it. Squats, planks, press-ups, lunges! Do you know what though, I started off this week crying in bed while my husband tried to give me a 'we can do this' pep talk, and I felt way, way better after the first exercise sesh with Mr. Wicks. I can't be cynical about this, it 's brilliant! I can't do half of the moves and stand there marching on the spot while the others contort, at certain points, but better than doing nothing, right.

Home hairdressing

Yeah, it was only a matter of time really. I had vowed never to cut my own hair. Ever since that terrible time when, aged thirteen, I had hacked around with my fringe so much and it got shorter and shorter and more crooked so I decided it would be a good idea simply to cut it off completely. I ended up pulling the hair forward from further back and it looked truly, truly vile. I had the obligatory '80s mullet at the time too so those were NOT good hair days. I'm never cutting my own hair again, was my resolution and I mostly stuck to it. I'm afraid that I ruined my daughter's hair, when she was a toddler, so I vowed not to touch the kids' barnets either and I've stuck to that. However, that hasn't stopped me experimenting with colour...and er, I've dyed my hair pink:

Note to self - put makeup on next time you post a picture!

I feel a little bit 'My little Pony' but the next time you see me it'll have grown out so not to worry, eh. 

So reader, I hope you are keeping well, do feel free to leave a comment. Let's do a video call at some point, yeah, because it would be nice to see your lovely face. xxx

The Portrait of the Artist as a (not so) young dog

Hmmmm....do you think?

Space Dorg returns

Add caption

Hello, September!

I love September - all those deliciously crunchy, colourful autumn leaves - like a bowl of vegetable crisps, and the cool but sunny mornings. It's the month of new beginnings - the new school year and all that - clean slate. September is a far better month to have resolutions than January, I always think. I am filled with good intentions, mainly to try and stave off the existential angst/post holiday blues/back to school dread that the beginning of the aforementioned new school year brings on.

Tapping
So this month I'm going to try tapping - after reading an article about it in Psychologies magazine. 'To change something you have to embrace it first'. The article focused on accepting something you disliked about yourself or felt was holding you back.
Tapping works on similar principles as acupressure or at least it accessing the same points on your body as acupuncture and is purported to help deal with pain, emotional problems and issues within yourself. I'm hoping it will help me counter procrastination, fear of change, low level episodes of depression, self loathing - you know, the minor stuff...

On the one hand it does kinda sound like absolute bollocks, on the other, if it gets me to clear out my house it's worth a try.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRfLTQjJhp0

Water baby
I'd forgotten how much I loved swimming. I took the kids to the local pool the other day, after they'd pestered me remorselessly, with the aid of my obliging Mum and we had a great time. The kids really enjoyed it, my mum seemed to enjoy it and I quickly forgot to be worried about being seen in a swimsuit and let myself enjoy the sensation of weightlessness and the fun to be had in ploughing through the water like a seal. What really revolutionised it for me was the fact that now the kids can swim I didn't have to stand there holding them up and getting cold.
Best of all though was how I felt after the swim - calm, happy and that nothing was insurmountable. Friends, I almost never feel like this!! I dare say it won't happen every time but it's certainly enough to induce me to want to go again.

So am going to make a point of going swimming or doing an aquafit class once a week - fancy joining me?

Learning
A new course. Possibly. This very much depends on something that I'm waiting to hear back from...will keep you posted.

What else? A daily act of kindness? A parenting course?? Yoga (yawn!!)

Happy September, y'all!

Hair today

Last week I committed the cardinal sin of going to a different hairdresser. 

I'm perfectly happy with my usual hairdresser - we have a good relationship - as far as you can have a good relationship with someone you hardly know and (probably) have very little in common with. We have a little bit of chat but then she provides me with several thick magazines, so we don't have to make too much conversation. She is beautiful, young and glossy - like a freshly wrapped boiled sweet, but she doesn't make me feel like an irrelevant piece of shit. And, when I'm paying the bill, she always remembers to apply the corporate discount (I don't get many perks at work but that's one of them). 

So, it wasn't a grievance against her that propelled me to another institution, it was simply that I was going on holiday and wanted to get my hair done. We'd booked a fairly last minute break, I was crazy busy in the run up and tried to get an appointment the week before the hols but had no joy. 

Let me tell you about my hair - it's thick and it grows fast. When I was growing up, everyone used to go on about how lovely it was. Basically however hideous I felt and feel, I always felt that the one thing I could rely on was my hair. My hair should have a Facebook page and Instagram account to itself, it lives a far more glamorous and important existence than I do and if it was a separate, sentient entity, I'm sure it would register it's disappointment at being stuck on such a spud-like visage as mine. However, let's just imagine that it's not a separate entity and imagine that it's part of me. I feel that I'm going to be punished for liking it. Pride comes before a fall and it's surely the ultimate sin, as a woman, to feel positive about any part of your body (is hair your body??) 

So I went to this other hairdresser because a) I could get an appointment in the week before my holiday, b) I could make an online booking, rather than face the horror of speaking to a human person on the phone and c) they had a '50% off all colour treatments' on Tuesdays. I was nervous but optimistic. On the day in question a twelve year old girl led me over to my chair and asked me what I wanted done. She was my hairdresser. I think hairdressing must be like modelling in that you are on the scrapheap by the age of thirty and have to retrain as a racing car driver. When you enter a salon you have to make your peace with the fact that you will have your hair done by a highly skilled but sometimes malevolent child.

Just because she's twelve, I reasoned with myself, doesn't mean she's shit.

As an aside, I sometimes suspect that if I was a proper, serious person, I would have my hair cut into some kind of brutal, utilitarian buzz cut, however because I'm essentially a vain, foppish poodle, I persist with the long hair. I basically have to have it tied up for the whole of the summer anyway, otherwise I get too hot, so I do my spell of Spartan living then. 

After we had a Q and A and slight tussle over the colour I wanted my streaks to go - she looked mildly incredulous at my choice of caramel swatch, she proceeded to do stuff with foil and bleach. The bleach smelled like the stuff you chuck down the toilet, rather than the stuff I'd smelled in the hairdresser before. The twelve year old didn't try to make conversation (fine) neither did she offer me a magazine. I couldn't get a signal in the salon so couldn't waste my time with a bit of pointless browsing either. I was left alone with my reflection - dreadful and my reflections - equally bad. 

So you know I said my hair is thick - it's also quite knotty, especially when wet. The hairdresser dealt with this by tugging at it brutally with a horse brush. She also had those hard, pointy nails which made contact with my cheeks, on more than one occasion and ploughed ruthlessly through my roots. This was all manageable albeit not particularly pleasant, the worst part of the ordeal was when she kept asking me to put my head further back while she put foil and domestos in my crown. At points I wondered how far I could stretch my neck back before it snapped. Would my people-pleasing tendencies be the death of me?

So anyway, my neck did not snap, my hair looked ok, if a little orange, and, although they charged me more than the price I'd been quoted on the online booking form, I did at least manage to get my hair done before I went on holiday. Maybe the nails raking my face were like the scratches that one of the characters has to endure in The Horse and his Boy, to punish her for being responsible for getting her maid whipped - divine punishment for going to a different hairdresser!

Dear Reader

Good News

With my last post, I gave you a beginning and middle but no ending, it was that most unsatisfying of things - a story without a resolution.
Well, without more preamble I’ll tell you that I had the lab results back on Friday and they were clear - ‘report does not show any malignancy’ - so, yippee!

I’ve always been a bit of a hypochondriac but I hadn’t been unduly worried about the mole until I saw the scientist Dr George McGavin talking on BBC Breakfast News about how his skin cancer - which started out as a black dot on his foot, had been misdiagnosed as a verruca:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/david-attenborough-consultant-told-deadly-17158497
I heard his story and it panicked me a bit -  I had a small dark dot on my foot - would it turn out to be malignant melanoma?
Dr George McGavin seems to be responding well to his treatment and the new drug therapy he has been given has been successful but it could have been so much worse. So the lesson here, I guess, would be to still go to the doctor if you’re worried about a mole, or about anything else, and don’t be scared to get a second opinion.

Where are the loos?

Moving on, why are the women's toilets often miles away in a pub? I had this thought last night as I travelled through a labyrinth, down several flights of stairs and across multiple thresholds and doorways. I wrestled a Minotaur, had to answer a complex riddle and complete a muddy obstacle course before I was allowed to empty my bladder!
Do you know the Minotaur myth?

The Minotaur was the offspring of the Cretan Queen Pasiphae and a majestic bull. Due to the Minotaur's monstrous form, King Minos ordered the craftsman, Daedalus, and his son, Icarus, to build a huge maze known as the Labyrinth to house the beast. 
So, you're a queen and you see this bull and you think - I really want to have sex with that creature! Why? Because it has a big willy, presumably, and the myth was written by a man who thinks that that's what all women want. I mean, I'd be looking at the hooves and surmising that the bull wouldn't be very good at foreplay but there you go. Never mind the fact that someone has to build a complex maze to house the resulting offspring of your congress with said bull and then put a Ladies toilet at the end of it!

Whilst I was waiting for my lab results to come through I watched a lot of the comedy series, Miranda, on Netflix, and remembered why I liked it. There are lots of fart jokes and pratfalls but it also has a warm heart and the main character continually breaks the fourth wall, long before Phoebe Waller Bridge did it in Fleabag. I know, I know, two very different types of programme, don't @ me!
I love Miranda's decor in Miranda - as much as I used to enjoy the vicar's curtains in The Vicar of Dibley. It must be a decree that to be the main female character in a sitcom, you must have quirky furnishings. After all, that's all we women care about isn't it, thus proved by my mentioning it here!
But still, I love Miranda and I'm going to think about it next time I have the urge to gallop down a corridor at work, which is surprisingly frequently.

In other news, my kids had brilliant school reports but I know as soon as I type this you'll hate me and think me smug, so don't worry, hate away! You're allowed.

Why do I keep buying clothes?
Also I keep buying dresses - I just can't seem to stop. Fuck - listen to me going on about sodding decor and dresses - what have I become?? But anyway, I wore one of the dresses last night and it was very comfortable and it's the only attire that's truly bearable in the summer so you can jog on with your judgements.
(I'm still quite an angry person, despite the dresses!) Sorry about that.

I realise that this post doesn't have a unifying theme. So let's just call it the beginning of July.

Gotta run, speak soon. Love Ooo! Xx