Time to invest for later life
CAN you touch your toes? Really? What I mean is, can you bend over and while keeping your knees straight, put the palms of your hands flat on the floor and your nose on your knee? Aha! Thought not. Try this one. Sit on the floor with your legs wide apart and lean over and put your chin on the floor? Hmmm. A bit stiff, aren’t you? And I bet you are younger than I am. What are we going to do about you?
Yes, that’s “another week hardly underway” and yet I have already been to my exercise class and survived. I know human rights can be a bit of a problem in other places but I always understood Cyprus’ record to be exemplary until I became a torture victim myself. That innocent looking institution around the corner looks like a normal ballet school but I know from experience what agony and torment is perpetrated within its walls. Three times a week, while all the pink little ballerinas that pirouette about there in the afternoons are safely at school, I am drawn there by the magnetic thudding of music that I used to like until it became forever associated with pain…
I was telling my friend Mehmetali about this the other day and he said that personally he preferred activities like reading and photography that didn’t involve too much physical effort. I was really struck by this – to him it was as though keeping fit was just an option, along with many other ways of passing your time. Health did not enter into it. I envy him. I have never had the luxury of seeing it this way.
Since the day I first walked in through the doors of Betty Laine’s Dancing Academy (“Yes, that’s Laine with an ‘i’, darling”) at the age of ten, I became a slave to my inner masochist. It was not all about pink satin and white tulle – it was 12 hours a week of exquisitely painful battling with my body over who was master. I have never lost this instinct although I don’t always win any more… but then who needs to do developpees and ronds de jambes en l’air when you are an old bag like me? The excellent classes that Claire Andreou devises at Danceworks are based on her deep knowledge of the benefits of ballet exercises and other fitness methods that she makes achievable for the oldie mums of those little grade twos and threes mixed with her own personal brand of pure torture, obviously.
I may be an oldie mum, granted. But I have a problem. No pink ballerinas. It is not hereditary. My daughters are with Mehmetali on this one. If they really want exercise they will turn the pages of a book or press buttons on their game boys. But that is because they are too young to know or care what we in Claire’s exercise class know on a deep level – that doing your eleventh slow sit-up to the bluesy strains of “Let me be your hero, baby” is more pleasurable than sex. But joking apart, when it comes to children, especially ones who haven’t inherited the masochism gene and hate pink, we seriously need an incentive to get them exercising.
They don’t understand that exercise stores up huge benefits for later life. Later life is too far off for them but it is where I am now, and I recently read, I might say with mounting self-satisfaction, an article in the New Scientist that said my ballet lessons had been good for my bones. New research has proved that lots of ballet or sport for adolescent girls builds bone mass and helps avoid or reduce skeletal problems later on, such as osteoporosis. That is, especially if you continue some kind of exercise regime beyond the point where you are too old to turn pirouettes any more.
Well, I am doing my best… So it is time to convince the children that yet again Mummy is right and they must get off their bottoms more than occasionally. I am pessimistic. I fear that mastering my own body is one thing but mastering theirs is another matter. Perhaps I should just try dumping them seven kilometers away and leaving them to walk home. Dream on…
