Phase two of my recovery means that I have to participate in something I loathe more than a dog licking my face or humping my leg. I have to exercise. I hate exercising. I'm not fat, by any means, and I eat well and healthy, but there's an alacrity of body that needs to be resurrected. If ever I had to choose between lying in bed all day and eating chocolates, or subjecting myself to any sort of sweat-inducing physical manoeuvring that didn't include a smart man with a hot body, I would take the chocolates every time. I am the worst co-ordinated sports person in the world, but I am absolutely the best loser - I've had a lot of practice. To ensure I can return with due haste to my book, my bed and my chocolates, I lose the game early: graciously, diplomatically, and with a smile on my face.
I could ride a tricycle, but this achievement ended when I almost drowned after accidentally riding it into the deep end of the swimming pool, when I was practising "look ma, no teeth!" I hated swimming so much as a child that I was the only pre-pubescent girl in the school to have her menstrual period every Monday for three months during the torture of swimming lessons in the freezing, chlorine stinking Camps Bay Pubic Pool. When my concerned swimming instructor suggested my mother have me physically examined, she was told I hadn't started My Periods yet, although I tried to convince her otherwise by putting mercurochrome on a sanitary pad that I'd convinced a friend to give me. To convince everyone, I also put mascara on my three new pubic hairs. I also rolled up tissues into minute balls, and taped them to my flat chest so I could pretend that growing up had begun. This is a secret I've told no one, so you'd best keep it to yourself.
I was fleet footed enough to be given the position of hockey goalie, as I'd trained myself to flee from every sporting event that crossed my path. I fled from a posse of hockey-stick wielding girls, with jiggling bosoms and sweaty armpits, right into the hydrangea bushes near the school toilets. I broke my wrist leaping over the tennis net to congratulate my opponent who had smashed any of my prospective sporting achievements to a pulp in love-fifteen minutes.
I swam in the ocean at Muizenberg, and was stung by bluebottles so I had to be doused with vinegar and sit shivering under a towel, while my friends were fondled in the waves. Surfboards were like beaching whales beneath me. While my peers turned golden and blonde and developed curves and whey, I burst my appendix, freckled in the sun and my hair turned burnt orange. As for cycling, I crashed my bicycle into the mesh of a tennis court and smashed three toes.
I broke my jaw with a skipping rope and it had to be wired shut. I was too short for netball, unless someone held me up to the ring. But I mentioned, I could run like the wind. Trying to impress my small children in the Parent's Race at their school sports day, I ran so fast the spectators could have been forgiven for thinking that Beep Beep the Road Runner was on the field. However, my feet lost contact with terra firma and I fell flat on my face in the mud, to the mortifying shame of my children who were watching me through fingers over their faces. I picked myself up, dusted myself off, and volunteered for the Parent's Potato Race. When these fruits of my loins fled, sobbing, begging to other mothers to be adopted, I knew my competitive sporting life was finally over. Thank the Gods. I took up macrame and chocolate.
Give me a mountain to hike, an expanse of water to paddle, or a tree to climb, I'll be okay. I can handle exploration and adventure. I can't handle weight and lycra.
But now that I am of a certain age, if I so much as walk past someone eating chocolate, it will go directly to my thighs where kilojoules reside in dimply little pits.
So with a few weeks to tone up before Kathmandu, I signed up for Zumba, aqua aerobics and whatever sort of mechanical torture I can manage. I started simply riding a friend's bike to the gym. When I told her the crash helmet straps were cutting the circulation to my brain, she told me I'd put it on back to front. I told her I thought they were wind deflectors. She sped ahead of me, her toned and terrific legs pedalling faster than the eye could register as she leaped over cracked concrete verges, ducked below low hanging eucalypt branches and grabbed stray lemons from neighbours' trees on the fly. Every time I rounded a corner, panting, sweat dripping down my nose and afraid I'd be lost in this wasteland forever, I found her one leg up on the pedal, with a "what took you so long" look on her smooth face.
After the chaotic traffic, beauty and sophistication of Sydney, after the sudden surprises of waterfalls and forests, the buzzing cafes and cultural collisions, after the architecture and bridges, the rivers and cliffs, I expected SOME traffic to come out of a Perth side street. ONE truck to roar past me. One big fat shady tree to rest under. At least a dog to come out and nip my ankles or a group of walkers, or some people crossing the road carrying flowers. But nothing. Not a car. Not a taxi. Not a pedestrian. So quiet. So still. So empty. So wilted. So. Bloody. Hot.
This crazy, isolated place, right at the other end of Australia, a life of itself that can be seen from space because it's in the middle of nowhere, is like a ghost town during soaring summer temperatures. Every time I return with the wild, insane notion that I really should give up my itinerant life of following gypsies and doing belly dancing lessons in Dubai, so I can be a better mother to my children, to live here and cook and darn their clothes, my altruism lasts until my first attack of heatstroke or agoraphobia.
So she dragged me off to her Gym: her fabulous body and tone testament to the advantages of exercise - chocolate = drooling men. Where, writhing in misery, I signed up for a month, even though I'm here less than that. She sprinted to the cross trainer, towel and water in hand. I followed, and once I'd managed not to loose my footing, survived an astonishing 1.37 minutes of muscle torture. She then propped herself up against a wall, pretending she was sitting on a chair and did the equivalent of filing her nails, while I, alongside her, thought that every sinew and cartilage and tendon in my legs was going to snap and fling me to the ceiling as my legs trembled with exertion. I lasted for a count of 8. I think she's still there.
I managed the rower, because there's a lake where I used to live, and I once went to the other side of the world - or so it seemed - across the ocean in a kayak in Turkey. But on that rower - three minutes, 12 calories, a heart rate of 110 and I was done.
I went on the walker, confidently cranking it up to 6.5kph, and watched with delight as my lost-calorie count crept up and up and up and I was counting the chocolates I'd be able to indulge in later. When the count reached 125 and I could barely draw breath, I realised it was my heart rate being measured. I needed to slow down, so I pressed a red button. When nothing happened and I was still striding out, I pulled the red button right out of its socket, still attached to a cord. The machine stopped instantly, almost catapaulting me face first into the sweaty groin of the seventy-something Iron Man who was pumping iron like a Gulf Oil rig. Bells and whistles went off on my walker, and the few staff, reading backdated issues of Muscles R Us, looked up momentarily and went back to flipping pages. I'd activated the emergency button, used for heart attacks. Nobody noticed.
I'd covered a half kilometre. I looked around to see the other survivors of this daily ordeal, at the flying spit and sweat, at their Phar Lap muscles, jiggling jowls and grim faces, their soaked sweat bands, their dehydrated dribbles of calorie enriched bottled water, and I thought how much nicer it would be to tone up my muscles doing yoga in Kathmandu. Besides, the chocolate there costs more than a gold bar.
But because I'd committed to a month, this morning I waded into the pool to do aqua aerobics with 25 women who were too fat to do any exercise on terra firma. I wore a bikini and sunglasses, they wore strap on hats, full body suits and had ready supplies of thermal bottles filled with choc milk keeping cool in the shallows. The temperature was gearing up to 34 degrees and, submerged, I wouldn't get into too much trouble. Besides, I was at least 30 kilos lighter than the lightest. And three inches shorter.
Walk! The instructor shouted. Walk? I'm in water! Run! She shouted. Run, in water? I followed the water borne mob, using their slipstream to carry me onwards. Touch the ground and jump! she shouted - ground - what ground! I was flailing around like a turtle in the deep end. I did a neat little breaststroke back to the shallows where my feet could touch the bottom, the only one there, waiting for the flotilla to advance back to my territory.
The instructor handed out long tubes of polystyrene. Put them behind your knees, she shouted - and use your arms like propellors! I zoomed off like a u boat, while the rest of the submarines managed to stay in place. I swam back to position. Now, put them under your feet and march your arms, she yelled, over Tina Turner's Simply The Best! pumping a disco beat. I did, and spun around like a gstring in a tumble dryer - my legs way up in the air, a mouthful of water and face down. When I surfaced, the Others were blithely paddling away, ballast in place. Then I realised the problem. I have DD boobs. Not that that's a problem. But I have size 8/10 hips. So I'm top heavy. And the others were either very nicely balanced - thankyou very much - with their size 16 hips and boobs, or bottom heavy, or leg and bottom heavy, which would mean they would never topple over. Ever. Nor would they lose their bikini bottoms, which I did, every time we had to Jump! Jump! Jump! while an aged Mr Universe hobbled with his cane and floatie board to the edge of the pool to watch everyone jiggling. , All that showed of me was my feet. And my bare bottom. And my DD's.
I've taken a leaf out of the Fat Ladies' books, or more appropriately, a muffin out of their tea breaks. Eat all the chocolate I want, and plums, and chips, and grapes, and shortbread biscuits, lie on the sofa for the rest of the afternoon, buy a mu mu or two, do a couple of aqua classes a week, and enjoy myself splashing around, never mind which way is up. Besides, I couldn't again wear my bikini in the Torture Chamber, and it's a way of giving those pump freaks a dose of Vitamin DD at my expense. Anyway, I'm ensuring against a dose of cholera and its after effects. Ptwarrgh.
I could ride a tricycle, but this achievement ended when I almost drowned after accidentally riding it into the deep end of the swimming pool, when I was practising "look ma, no teeth!" I hated swimming so much as a child that I was the only pre-pubescent girl in the school to have her menstrual period every Monday for three months during the torture of swimming lessons in the freezing, chlorine stinking Camps Bay Pubic Pool. When my concerned swimming instructor suggested my mother have me physically examined, she was told I hadn't started My Periods yet, although I tried to convince her otherwise by putting mercurochrome on a sanitary pad that I'd convinced a friend to give me. To convince everyone, I also put mascara on my three new pubic hairs. I also rolled up tissues into minute balls, and taped them to my flat chest so I could pretend that growing up had begun. This is a secret I've told no one, so you'd best keep it to yourself.
I was fleet footed enough to be given the position of hockey goalie, as I'd trained myself to flee from every sporting event that crossed my path. I fled from a posse of hockey-stick wielding girls, with jiggling bosoms and sweaty armpits, right into the hydrangea bushes near the school toilets. I broke my wrist leaping over the tennis net to congratulate my opponent who had smashed any of my prospective sporting achievements to a pulp in love-fifteen minutes.
I swam in the ocean at Muizenberg, and was stung by bluebottles so I had to be doused with vinegar and sit shivering under a towel, while my friends were fondled in the waves. Surfboards were like beaching whales beneath me. While my peers turned golden and blonde and developed curves and whey, I burst my appendix, freckled in the sun and my hair turned burnt orange. As for cycling, I crashed my bicycle into the mesh of a tennis court and smashed three toes.
I broke my jaw with a skipping rope and it had to be wired shut. I was too short for netball, unless someone held me up to the ring. But I mentioned, I could run like the wind. Trying to impress my small children in the Parent's Race at their school sports day, I ran so fast the spectators could have been forgiven for thinking that Beep Beep the Road Runner was on the field. However, my feet lost contact with terra firma and I fell flat on my face in the mud, to the mortifying shame of my children who were watching me through fingers over their faces. I picked myself up, dusted myself off, and volunteered for the Parent's Potato Race. When these fruits of my loins fled, sobbing, begging to other mothers to be adopted, I knew my competitive sporting life was finally over. Thank the Gods. I took up macrame and chocolate.
Give me a mountain to hike, an expanse of water to paddle, or a tree to climb, I'll be okay. I can handle exploration and adventure. I can't handle weight and lycra.
But now that I am of a certain age, if I so much as walk past someone eating chocolate, it will go directly to my thighs where kilojoules reside in dimply little pits.
So with a few weeks to tone up before Kathmandu, I signed up for Zumba, aqua aerobics and whatever sort of mechanical torture I can manage. I started simply riding a friend's bike to the gym. When I told her the crash helmet straps were cutting the circulation to my brain, she told me I'd put it on back to front. I told her I thought they were wind deflectors. She sped ahead of me, her toned and terrific legs pedalling faster than the eye could register as she leaped over cracked concrete verges, ducked below low hanging eucalypt branches and grabbed stray lemons from neighbours' trees on the fly. Every time I rounded a corner, panting, sweat dripping down my nose and afraid I'd be lost in this wasteland forever, I found her one leg up on the pedal, with a "what took you so long" look on her smooth face.
After the chaotic traffic, beauty and sophistication of Sydney, after the sudden surprises of waterfalls and forests, the buzzing cafes and cultural collisions, after the architecture and bridges, the rivers and cliffs, I expected SOME traffic to come out of a Perth side street. ONE truck to roar past me. One big fat shady tree to rest under. At least a dog to come out and nip my ankles or a group of walkers, or some people crossing the road carrying flowers. But nothing. Not a car. Not a taxi. Not a pedestrian. So quiet. So still. So empty. So wilted. So. Bloody. Hot.
This crazy, isolated place, right at the other end of Australia, a life of itself that can be seen from space because it's in the middle of nowhere, is like a ghost town during soaring summer temperatures. Every time I return with the wild, insane notion that I really should give up my itinerant life of following gypsies and doing belly dancing lessons in Dubai, so I can be a better mother to my children, to live here and cook and darn their clothes, my altruism lasts until my first attack of heatstroke or agoraphobia.
I lived in this dusty city for over 20 years, and now back here for a VERY short time, I still have no connection with it whatsoever. It's so hot. It's so dry. It's so dispossessed. Did I say it's hot? It's as if I've walked into a pizza oven. People don't have gardens anymore. They have weed farms. Spiky bits of dessicated vegetation push their way through cracked bricks; through concrete, through bitumen. The trees look exhausted; they wilt by 9am. It is absolutely true that rain doesn't fall on this plain for six months of the year. The cars look dusty, and exhausted too, and bleached by the relentless glare. You wouldn't dare waste water, washing your car. There are ducks that need it more. The sun is up, high, at 6am, when people are already wearing sunglasses and hats. This crazy state didn't want daylight saving because educated people said it would increase obesity and skin cancer; it would fade the curtains, and the cows wouldn't milk properly and the water would run out.
Grass has been replaced by sand expanses, or acres of brick. They don't weed, or mow, because that will increase the dust and denudation. Many homes have roller shutters to keep out the heat. Water restrictions have been legislated for years. My daughter recycles her bath water to water her herbs; but still, she says, she feels guilty at having to actually use water. Not that I should compare, but I do: in Sydney the air brushes over me like a soft veil; here - it's like a Brillo pad. I have an acute yearning, already, for the wild lilies that brushed my car as I drove down Wakehurst Parkway, my windows open so I could listen to the waterfalls. Here, the air bites the inside of my nose. People stay inside, or hunker down in pubs, where the beer is cool and closed footwear is not compulsory. Slip Slop Slap was conceived here as a sun protection slogan: but in this heat, it could as well be an injuction for controlling heat-addled children.
Since I've been here, I've sheltered behind those curtains, in a pink sweaty heap, considering how I was going to survive any sort of activity that didn't involve chocolates or nice brown men. My host found me snoring and dribbling on the sofa at 3pm, watching Judge Judy, heat drunk, listless, an arm draped along the tiled floor, fanning myself with used chocolate wrappers.
Grass has been replaced by sand expanses, or acres of brick. They don't weed, or mow, because that will increase the dust and denudation. Many homes have roller shutters to keep out the heat. Water restrictions have been legislated for years. My daughter recycles her bath water to water her herbs; but still, she says, she feels guilty at having to actually use water. Not that I should compare, but I do: in Sydney the air brushes over me like a soft veil; here - it's like a Brillo pad. I have an acute yearning, already, for the wild lilies that brushed my car as I drove down Wakehurst Parkway, my windows open so I could listen to the waterfalls. Here, the air bites the inside of my nose. People stay inside, or hunker down in pubs, where the beer is cool and closed footwear is not compulsory. Slip Slop Slap was conceived here as a sun protection slogan: but in this heat, it could as well be an injuction for controlling heat-addled children.
Since I've been here, I've sheltered behind those curtains, in a pink sweaty heap, considering how I was going to survive any sort of activity that didn't involve chocolates or nice brown men. My host found me snoring and dribbling on the sofa at 3pm, watching Judge Judy, heat drunk, listless, an arm draped along the tiled floor, fanning myself with used chocolate wrappers.
So she dragged me off to her Gym: her fabulous body and tone testament to the advantages of exercise - chocolate = drooling men. Where, writhing in misery, I signed up for a month, even though I'm here less than that. She sprinted to the cross trainer, towel and water in hand. I followed, and once I'd managed not to loose my footing, survived an astonishing 1.37 minutes of muscle torture. She then propped herself up against a wall, pretending she was sitting on a chair and did the equivalent of filing her nails, while I, alongside her, thought that every sinew and cartilage and tendon in my legs was going to snap and fling me to the ceiling as my legs trembled with exertion. I lasted for a count of 8. I think she's still there.
I managed the rower, because there's a lake where I used to live, and I once went to the other side of the world - or so it seemed - across the ocean in a kayak in Turkey. But on that rower - three minutes, 12 calories, a heart rate of 110 and I was done.
I went on the walker, confidently cranking it up to 6.5kph, and watched with delight as my lost-calorie count crept up and up and up and I was counting the chocolates I'd be able to indulge in later. When the count reached 125 and I could barely draw breath, I realised it was my heart rate being measured. I needed to slow down, so I pressed a red button. When nothing happened and I was still striding out, I pulled the red button right out of its socket, still attached to a cord. The machine stopped instantly, almost catapaulting me face first into the sweaty groin of the seventy-something Iron Man who was pumping iron like a Gulf Oil rig. Bells and whistles went off on my walker, and the few staff, reading backdated issues of Muscles R Us, looked up momentarily and went back to flipping pages. I'd activated the emergency button, used for heart attacks. Nobody noticed.
I'd covered a half kilometre. I looked around to see the other survivors of this daily ordeal, at the flying spit and sweat, at their Phar Lap muscles, jiggling jowls and grim faces, their soaked sweat bands, their dehydrated dribbles of calorie enriched bottled water, and I thought how much nicer it would be to tone up my muscles doing yoga in Kathmandu. Besides, the chocolate there costs more than a gold bar.
But because I'd committed to a month, this morning I waded into the pool to do aqua aerobics with 25 women who were too fat to do any exercise on terra firma. I wore a bikini and sunglasses, they wore strap on hats, full body suits and had ready supplies of thermal bottles filled with choc milk keeping cool in the shallows. The temperature was gearing up to 34 degrees and, submerged, I wouldn't get into too much trouble. Besides, I was at least 30 kilos lighter than the lightest. And three inches shorter.
Walk! The instructor shouted. Walk? I'm in water! Run! She shouted. Run, in water? I followed the water borne mob, using their slipstream to carry me onwards. Touch the ground and jump! she shouted - ground - what ground! I was flailing around like a turtle in the deep end. I did a neat little breaststroke back to the shallows where my feet could touch the bottom, the only one there, waiting for the flotilla to advance back to my territory.
The instructor handed out long tubes of polystyrene. Put them behind your knees, she shouted - and use your arms like propellors! I zoomed off like a u boat, while the rest of the submarines managed to stay in place. I swam back to position. Now, put them under your feet and march your arms, she yelled, over Tina Turner's Simply The Best! pumping a disco beat. I did, and spun around like a gstring in a tumble dryer - my legs way up in the air, a mouthful of water and face down. When I surfaced, the Others were blithely paddling away, ballast in place. Then I realised the problem. I have DD boobs. Not that that's a problem. But I have size 8/10 hips. So I'm top heavy. And the others were either very nicely balanced - thankyou very much - with their size 16 hips and boobs, or bottom heavy, or leg and bottom heavy, which would mean they would never topple over. Ever. Nor would they lose their bikini bottoms, which I did, every time we had to Jump! Jump! Jump! while an aged Mr Universe hobbled with his cane and floatie board to the edge of the pool to watch everyone jiggling. , All that showed of me was my feet. And my bare bottom. And my DD's.
I've taken a leaf out of the Fat Ladies' books, or more appropriately, a muffin out of their tea breaks. Eat all the chocolate I want, and plums, and chips, and grapes, and shortbread biscuits, lie on the sofa for the rest of the afternoon, buy a mu mu or two, do a couple of aqua classes a week, and enjoy myself splashing around, never mind which way is up. Besides, I couldn't again wear my bikini in the Torture Chamber, and it's a way of giving those pump freaks a dose of Vitamin DD at my expense. Anyway, I'm ensuring against a dose of cholera and its after effects. Ptwarrgh.
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