At the beginning of the eighties, exercise became fashionable.
Aerobics, jogging, running, squash, dance movement, yoga et al plus
Jane Fonda telling us all to ‘burn’. (I tried ‘burning’ one day, fell over
backwards and could not walk for a fortnight). Strolling about
through water meadows or walking in the wonderful Welsh
mountains at my own unhurried pace is perfect exercise, it seems,
for me. Violent activity gives me a headache, and I avoid it wherever
possible. But, pressurized in my first year in Oxford, I felt reluctantly
that I should emulate my fellows. I joined a class of enthusiastic
ladies at an exercise class run in a health farm, advertised in the local
paper. This was a serious mistake. The health farm, set in a luxurious
private estate, was designed to give a feeling of ease and relaxation.
Thick, plain, carpets in every room, bowls of expensive flower
arrangements everywhere, and new copies of Good Housekeeping
and Vogue lay on the waiting-room table. There was a suffocating
richness in the very air, as if the place itself was preening its
superiority.
The woman taking the class was straight out of Dallas, I imagine,
or some such fantasy grown-up fairy-tale world. She had long silky
blonde hair, long red nails, lots of make-up and a lovely figure clad in
hundreds of pounds worth of leopard skin leotard, plus trimmings.
The morning of my first class I had carefully chosen what to wear. An
old pair of black tights, feet cut off, seemed appropriate: they would
be taken for half a leotard. Plus, one of my daughter’s T-shirts. This
ensemble appeared to be perfectly adequate when I tried it on at
home, but in the changing room (all pine louver doors) I saw it in a
rather different light. The other members of class had bought in neat
little Gucci changing bags, brilliant aquamarine, red, purple and
peacock blue leotards (from Harrods, I gathered), with matching
tops, and some strange garments called leg warmers (not articles of
clothing I could immediately see a use for. We were not ballet
dancers, were we?). Looking round, I felt no empathy here and to say
that I was the odd man out would be a great understatement. We
trouped off to an exercise room with a parquet floor and William
Morris chintz curtains. For the next hour, to the sounds of some
classical music (Chopin would have been appalled at the antics his
Mazurkas inspired) and some popular music, we bent and stretched,
lay on the floor with our legs in the air, pointed our toes, danced on
the spot, and generally asked our bodies to behave in an irregular
manner. Mine rebelled against it all. At the end of the hour I escaped
thankfully, my body indignant at such unwelcome exercise, my mind
stupefied by the waste of time and money. A lovely walk over open
fields with an abundance of fresh air, aesthetic views, and music
from the wind ‘listing where it bloweth’ – my kind of exercise – was
surely better for the body and soul than cavorting about in an
expensive health farm.
Several months later, inspired by a friend who said that exercise in
the form of free dance movement was sheer delight, I made one
further attempt at communal exercise activity. The Church Hall,
where the dance movement took place on a Tuesday evening, was
very different from the Health Hall. It was cold and dirty with a worn-
out air. There were no changing rooms and as far as I could tell, no
lavatories. But here, at least, the other class members did not wear
exotic leotards and where my cut-off tights and T-shirts were de
rigeur. An indeterminate lady thumped out music from an old piano
whilst another tried to get some form of order into the class’s
dancing by shouting out things such as:
“Feet in, feet out, to the right, bend to the left, bend in, bend out,
jump, and again….”
I never got to grips with it at all. It seemed that I, whilst listening for
the next instructions, got behind with the previous one so that I was
bending or jumping when everyone else was doing the opposite. I
persevered for several weeks but there was no improvement in my
timing, and although I quite enjoyed the dancing to describe it as
‘sheer delight’ was certainly overdoing it. I abandoned the struggle
for coordination.
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