I’ve been a fan of Kate Bush since the beginning of her career in 1978. I think I identify with her general weirdness and artiness, and her birthday is the same as mine although she’s older than I am. She’s also from Kent, like me, but of course she’s far more successful and famous than me or most of the people I know. At the age of thirteen I wrote an essay for school about how I regarded her as a rôle model, so that’s one of those things you can keep behind your ear.
Nor am I alone, even now. In recent years there has been an annual re-enactment of her interpretive dance routine from the ‘Wuthering Heights’ video, where hundreds of people gather in open spaces all over the world to recreate that moment at the beginning of her fame:
I don’t know if this is widely known, but Emily Brontë shares Ms Bush’s and my birthday, and I presume there’s a link there although I haven’t come across her explicitly mentioning that so far as I can remember.
During the early days of the lockdown, I decided to use the ‘Wuthering Heights’ routine as a kind of exercise programme. It proved to be fairly successful but not particularly energetic, and strong though my attachment to the woman and her music is, I’d probably do better copying someone like Dua Lipa. That said, I do believe dance is a potential key to keeping fit in the circumstances I’ve been in over the past few years, though not the only one.
I took up long distance running as a teenager at secondary school. I used to enjoy it, partly because it had no explicit element of competition or aggression. From about the age of twelve, I used to run the thirteen kilometre annual sponsored walk and it kind of developed from there. It may be partly down to my ADHD, but I just couldn’t be doing with plodding along the whole route at walking speed. From the age of fourteen I used to swim a kilometre each Sunday at the local swimming pool, Kingsmead. I walked from school every day, a distance of around five kilometres, and I used to run on Wednesday afternoons. From January ’85, when I was seventeen, I used to get up at 5 am each morning. However, I have never made a huge effort to increase my distance, duration or stamina, although I do walk almost everywhere under about ten kilometres, including to and from all my clients as home visits. It isn’t massively energetic, but it’s something, and I actually consider it to be fairly normal, though perhaps less so in recent years in heavily industrialised countries such as this one.
Or I did. Once I started caring for my father, it became more difficult to get out of the house for protracted periods of time due to his demands on me, which could possibly come at any time of the day or night. At the start of 2019 I did Couch to 5K, which I eventually built up to running seventeen kilometres in a single day, though not in one go. However, the point did not come by which I no longer regarded it as a chore. It was good to have done it, but never really good to do it. Just a relief to get it over with really. I also injured myself a few times, and I think there’s a trade-off there between fitness and injury because it seems that any kind of strenuous activity is likely to lead to injury, and once that’s happened it stops you from exercising while you recover.
At the opposite end of all this is Yoga, or rather Hatha Yoga. This I started when I was about four, which is apparently too young. I was able to follow it off a TV programme and had no idea what I was doing. Later on, when I was maybe eleven, I followed various books on the subject, and adopted some of the other practices such as kriyas and meditation. Eventually of course, I married someone who was deeply involved in Yoga and became a Yoga teacher. A number of issues arise with it. Firstly, at the time and since, fundamentalist Christians decided it was evil and Satanic, as they did lots of other things such as heavy metal music and Dungeons And Dragons. Secondly, it became heavily commercialised and commodified and tended to drift in the direction of sports and away from a spiritual practice, to the extent that people tend to ask you what kind of Yoga you practice, expecting an answer like “Bikram” or something when that isn’t what Yoga is about. It’s like asking someone who takes herbal remedies whether they get their stuff from Holland And Barrett. Finally, there’s the weird issue of cultural appropriation and Yoga, which I suspect is focussed mainly on what I can only think of as “degenerate” Yoga, perhaps not even deserving of a capital Y, i.e. the likes of the aforementioned Bikram Yoga, where they try to sell rich White Westerners as much as possible on the side of accoutrements, which is just despicable really. But I honestly don’t see how Yoga can be cultural appropriation, because to me Yoga is part of the fabric of reality. It isn’t just about asanas, and in fact some traditional Yoga practitioners disapprove even of doing asanas because they see them as glorifying the body, which should only be a temporary vessel encumbering the soul on its way to Nirvana. I’m not of that ilk. However, I’m aware that we got our concept of zero and place value from India via the Arab world, and I don’t consider mathematics using Western Arabic numerals to be cultural appropriation, so why would Yoga be? Quantum physics and relativity doesn’t belong to the West and attempts to address fundamental truths about reality, and so does Yoga. What’s the difference? Unfortunately I tend to honour Yoga more on a theoretical level and don’t pursue it much, although I do incorporate some asanas into my life in a kind of “first aid” therapeutic way, such as vrksasana to improve my balance, twists to deal with digestive issues and so forth.
The third form of exercise I’ve already mentioned, and is dancing. From about the age of fifteen to twenty-five, I used to dance a lot, go clubbing over some of that time and so forth. I don’t think I’m a good dancer by any means but I did very much adopt the idea of “dance like nobody’s watching”. I’ve even gone so far as to dance on stage, spontaneously. Although I’m aware that there’s a lot of theory and practice around dance, I know very little about any of that. There’s something out there called Labanotation, for example, and of course interpretive dance, and I did square dancing and maypole dancing at school and Scottish country dancing at a wedding once. The rest is just disco dancing. I will say one thing. Dance music and other pop or rock music swaps over in its greatness when you dance to it as opposed to listening to it. There are dance tracks which sound truly dreadful if you’re just sitting there listening to them which are absolutely awesome when you get up and dance to them, and also brilliant pieces of music for listening to which become totally dire when you try to dance. There’s another aspect, particularly to disco, which only dawned on me in recent years. As a White person I was kind of trained subtly to hate disco, but the thing is that disco is, albeit commercialised, Black, Latinx and Gay music, and this should be taken into consideration before one judges as a White straight person.
A common factor in all of these, probably due to lack of knowledge and being driven by enthusiasm rather than skill, is that I regularly seem to injure my knees to a limited extent. When I was younger, running on hard surfaces was supposed to be a big no-no, because it was thought to damage the joints generally. I don’t know what I think about this now. It’s apparently no longer thought to be the case, but I get the distinct impression that when I do this, it does seem to cause some kind of mild injury. However, one aspect of running and other similar forms of exercise is that they do induce mild inflammation and other types of injury temporarily which, I presume, makes the body stronger and healthier in the long term, so maybe that’s the influence here. Likewise with asanas in Yoga, when I was younger and didn’t know what I was doing. I used to twist my knees sideways rather un-physiologically and I wonder if this has had a long-term effect. It also happened with disco dancing and even cycling. After a night of solid dancing, I would often find that my knees in particular ached.
There was a time when I was both practicing asanas and running a lot, and I found that the increase in muscle tone and strength interfered with my suppleness. I think there may be a further trade-off here, and the question then arises of whether the joints need that support, as with the shoulder girdle in particular. I found that I preferred to be supple than strong. Presumably there are many people out there with hypermobility issues for whom this constitutes a real problem.
Overarching this entire thing of exercise, which is of course generally good for mental wellbeing if it doesn’t become an addiction, is a long-term reluctance to do any of it, which I found in particular set in during lockdown, and I’m now back in the position of being a couch potato. Some of this is situational, because it’s difficult to get out of the house for long, but as I’ve mentioned significant parts of my regimen, if it’s worthy of that name, could be undertaken indoors without any real issues, so what is it that’s stopping me? Is it low-level depression of some kind, or not feeling like I have enough space and time to myself? Is it a need to comfort eat? I wonder how many other people this affects. I also think it would be easier to move my father around if I had better muscle tone, as right now I don’t think it does either of us much good.
On this occasion then, I have a question for you in the interests of research: have you found yourself more reluctant to exercise as the pandemic situation goes on? I see lots of people run past the house, but how representative are they? What, again, is going on inside people’s homes which I don’t see? Let me know.
A Box Of Chocolates 