Hexercisin’

The WordPress back end bit has changed.  This has completely flummoxed me, and all this may well come out in Chinese, and upside down and backwards.  We shall see.

Apart from this, I have done a new thing today.  

I went to my first Pilates class.

Don’t all rush for the CLD (TM) at once.  

I know it’s a shock.

I am the first person to freely admit that I loathe exercise. I am, sadly, also the first person to admit that with my rapidly declining health, I really need to be more proactive, and as well as actually going to the Dr’s rather than just talking about it, that means making slightly healthier life choices.

One of the ladies who works at school is a Pilates instructor, and she has small classes that she runs from her house.  She had a space free, and caught me at a vulnerable moment.  I said yes.

I have been doing a lot of this over the last twelve months.  Saying yes that is.  The thing is, the more you say yes, the more you say yes.  It’s quite unnerving for someone who has spent large amounts of her life saying; ‘No thank you. No, no really. No.’

So I said yes to Pilates, and at half five today I staggered down the hill from my parents house, leaving the children to their tender mercies and donned my leisure wear for an hour of intense bendiness.

I have to say that I was truly awful at it.  I am not limber. I am not lithe. I am not snake hipped, and I have all the natural grace of a hippo with fallen arches.  My joints make strange cracking noises these days and a lot of ‘scree scree scree’ was going on. Me moving around rhythmically sounds like Nigel Molesworth on violin accompanied by Fotherington Tomas on the tuba.

I will not win any prizes for grace.

None of this creaksome activity is helped by the fact that I still cannot tell left from right, and I spent large parts of the evening galumphing in the other direction to everyone else.  Those were the parts where I wasn’t falling over, or rolling about like a distressed armadillo, as I described my activity to a concerned friend.

Mostly though, I enjoyed it far more than I thought I would. Actually, this wasn’t difficult as I expect to enjoy it not at all.  Any mild feeling of well being is a bonus.

I knew everyone in the class except one person, and they were very nice. I was allowed to fall over, fail to do things the right way round, and giggle when I collapsed, and everyone was very tolerant.  I did not kick anyone in the face by accident, so that was good.

I did trump.

Apparently this is normal. I was warned that it might be a side effect of some of the more rigorous exercises, and it was.

In keeping with the overarching metaphor of my Pilates experience as a musical disaster, I trumped with all the expertise of a small trumpet fanfare.

Luckily I did not blow a hole in my new leisure wear.  Nor did I gas my fellow Pilatists, so I shall be allowed back.

The children weren’t happy about this though. They were banking on me ripping a hole in my trousers.

Disappointed of Broughton Astley came the reply when I was forced to ‘fess up.

I shall endeavour to do better next week, both at farting and at Pilates.  I suspect I may be much stronger in one area than the other.  I shall leave it to you to guess which one.