Is there anything new to be said about cigarette smoking either
for or against? I think not. You smoke because you want to, or you
smoke because you are addicted, and your addiction beats your
willpower to discontinue. Or you do not smoke, never have, and
think it is disgusting. For me, as from the age of 15, I ventured out
into all weathers, I sought out unused lavatories and I loitered in
dark passages or wherever else I could light up without discovery,
and the smoking habit caught fire. It continued to blaze brightly for
the next twenty five years, and when I came to Oxford I was smoking
thirty five cigarettes a day. Discourses on ‘how I gave up smoking’
are boring to everyone. If you don’t smoke, then you cannot enjoy
the fuss and agony of giving up, and if you do smoke, have tried to
give up and haven’t succeeded, it is incredibly irritating to hear those
who have managed, talking self-righteously about how clever they
are. Listening to Miriam Stoppard on the radio one day, that
glamorous television/doctor personality twittering on about how
well she felt now that she no longer smoked and how ‘we could all
do it’ if we were determined and so on, I felt like killing her, not
emulating her. Sufficient to say, therefore, that with great difficulty I
did stop smoking. However, I believe that once a smoker always a
faintly reluctant non-smoker, and my constant dread is being, for any
length of time, with people who smoke. After a week with them I
would be back smoking myself. So, I try to keep away from smoking
people and smoking places.
The result of not smoking did not seem to be immediately
beneficial. Indeed, the opposite was true. Not only was I irritable and
bad tempered, but I got fatter and fatter. I put on two stone in about
6 months. Fair and forty go together, I know, but it was difficult to
discern whether it was the middle-age spread, or the lack of nicotine
to speed the metabolism, that was causing the embonpoint. Or both.
Living alone had presented new problems of what, with no fuss,
could I cook for myself. Cooking a Sunday joint for one was
ridiculous, expensive, and unnecessary. Making a stew and having to
eat it for four consecutive days on order to finish it was a kind of self-
inflicted culinary punishment. It reminded me of the Christmas
turkey. Delicious on the 25th, good on the 26th, less so on the 27th and
horrible thereafter. Puddings fared no better. Even a small apple
crumble, reheated on day two, is fairly unappetizing, so it joined the
uneaten stew in the dustbin. Good food is not on my list of essential
priorities for happy living. I seldom notice what I am eating – indeed I
am sometimes surprised to see an empty beans tin in the sink when I
have no recollection of eating them whatsoever. It has always been a
puzzle to me just how much discussion takes place about the relative
recipes, restaurants, wines and so on, as if they were a serious and
important part of life. Eating is generally supposed, I believe, to be
the optimum pleasure in middle age when the pleasures of sex
abate. Since my enjoyment of eating exciting or rich food is non-
existent I can only hope that the pleasure of sex will ever continue.
Life, otherwise, promises to be fairly dull.
But, obviously, gaining so much weight, I was eating the wrong
food. Finally, I went to see someone in the menopause department
at the Oxford Hospital. It might, I thought hopefully, be hormone
imbalance, and I could get something for it. The doctor I saw was
young and aggressive. She asked me lots of questions, mostly about
how much I drank. “Do you drink a lot?” she said. Doctors always ask this
question in a voice suggesting that they never touch drink and that they
suspect that you are an alcoholic.
“How much is a lot?” I asked. “Do you mean do I drink two bottles
of gin a day or two glasses of sherry after church on Sunday?” She
did not find me amusing. Finally, she wrote something on a piece of
paper. She had written one word on it: o-b-e-s-e. OBESE! Horrible
thoughts flew round my head. Obesity is serious. It implies several
things – none of them good. Greed, lack of self-control, lack of pride,
lack of intelligence, and obviously, lack of willpower, were just the
first few. But the dietician was very nice. She explained that human
beings were designed for a lifestyle, after evolution, as hoe-ers of
land and drawers or water. We needed then, with the fresh air,
exercise and long hours toiling, the benefit of three large meals a
day. This obviously no longer generally applies. Certainly, I should eat
very little because I do very little. Two or three apples, a little fish or
chicken, All Bran and two slices of wholemeal bread, ‘washed down’
with lashings of tea (with skimmed milk) or water, is about all I can
eat each day if I want to stay slim. (My nanny would have been
horrified. She taught my sister and I that three meals a day were
essential for our wellbeing). Now, years later, I have got the gist of
slimming. It is for every day of the year, every year, ad infinitum. It is
hard work and boring, and whether it is worth it is debatable. I try to
keep to the prescribed diet but sometimes rebel and buy delicious
homemade fudge, in a pretty packet, and eat it all in one go. And I
love it. I know now when I am fatter than I wish to be, and take
steps. I have accepted that my weight problem is a life battle, and
that it will never go away. When I become overweight, by my
standards, I go on the Cambridge diet for a week or two, which is
painless and very effective. I like having a chocolate drink for
breakfast, turkey soup for lunch and mushroom soup for dinner and
know that I am losing two pounds a day with no effort. So that is
what I do. It works, and it is cheap.
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….”
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