I’m on the rack again. Glancing at my watch. Silently willing the hour away, willing my life away until that evanescent moment when I’ll feel integrated, body and soul. Body, mind and soul. Currently, my mind is urging my body to stretch beyond its habitual capacity. Mind over matter. Remembering the insouciant ballet years of my childhood. My soul is elsewhere, floating beneath the clouds, swirling past the sloping garret window above my head along with the larks and the faintly screeching parakeets, a surprising, technicoloured addition to the Hackney skies.
I’m eleven, back on stage as the smallest girl in Liverpool two years running, dancing in Swan Lake at the Liverpool Empire with the Royal Ballet. The music swirls. The smell of powder and scent overpowers my nostrils. I feel heady. My eyes cloud until…
`Train! Train!’ hisses Prince Siegfried’s mother as she sweeps onstage, jabbing her finger at the swathe of velvet swirling around her feet, about to trip her up. As pageboy to the Queen, my halcyon moment of glory has evaporated. That crystalline blink of an eye when planets align and gods coalesce to point a finger benevolently in my direction – is smashed. Bungled through lack of attention. I’ll never have the chance to shine again. Be prepared. Don’t let time slide. Don’t slow down because absent-minded forces of malevolence will zip in and pounce, snatching a chance to reach for the stars.
≈
`They’re everywhere,’ says my neighbour, my Pilates neighbour. I strain to avoid brushing her fingers in an All Around The World hand sweep, coming to rest in a languorous Marilyn Monroe side stretch, knees shoved up to my right shoulder, arms flung wide, left leg splayed out like the recalcitrant arm of a clock, toes pointing to a quarter past eleven.
`They’ve escaped from Regents Park. They’re like rats. Let’s hope they don’t eat the rest of the birdlife.’ I shiver, retracting my arms into their sockets. There’s danger everywhere, especially in the air.
At 9:45 this morning, I hadn’t even left the house, still contemplating what to wear, which bus to catch. Half an hour ago I’d only just arrived, tentatively flinging out my mat, racing to keep up, to propel myself into a new life where I could stand with an imperious back and walk freely. Would my conversation sparkle into daylight, my every gesture magically invested with meaning, my body betraying a lifetime of careful nurturing: a determined struggle against the inevitable?
The music changes. Now it’s precise, rigorous, a modern take on Bach. A raga rhythm for my scudding thoughts. It pins me into momentary equilibrium, a soothing balm. It carries me into the 180-degree leg swings executed only falteringly to placate a lurking hip-knee contretemps. One false move and I’ll be flat on my back. But I already am, cautiously circling my right foot in a shaky, diminishing perimeter. What is this new skill to absorb: listening to one’s body? What about memory, spirit, hope? Conservation was never for me. I’m all-out abandon, lust and passion. Grab it while you can. Daredevil confrontation, impatient with the ditherers of this world. Yet here I am, carefully describing a half circle with one slowly cramping foot.
My stomach seizes up in sympathy. Living beyond one’s means, that’s been the only way to do it – until now, when the sharp pain and wrenching ache of the slightest wrong turn can render me impotent, paralysed and fuming. For what am I if not a perfectly functioning body? I’ve always lived in my head, believing the body can take care of itself. But how does one coax both to work in harmony and not discord?
`As you age, one’s physical body declines and the spiritual body takes over.’ So commented Gerda Geddes, my 75-year-old tai chi teacher. She’d learned her patient craft at the foot of a Chinese master on a paddy field outside Shanghai, copying his slow-motion movements by rote day after day, year after year. The spiritual body? Little evidence on that score. Struggling body: yes. Fighting and furious body: yes. Spiritual body: no. The only useful outcome has been the eating body, squirrelling up the greens, avocado fats and decent protein as `building blocks’, nourishment for the healthy body – not the wafer slim body of a ballet school regime or the sharply etched bones and rippling muscles of taller, younger models but the softer, rounder, frankly fatter curves of my newly odalisque figure, tightly bound in unforgiving elastane.
Wafted along by the early summer breeze, the smell of honeysuckle kicks in. It rustles through my nostrils, taking me away to the nearby flower market on Sunday mornings. Perhaps a pigeon will scratch its way across the windowpane or the music will have subsided into a mellow Turkish lament.
I hear a voice telling me to take an elastic band, the tough, yellow one, place it behind my waist, flattened at right angles to my bent arms and pu-ull, spinning it out above my head, pushing it forward in a challenging stretch. Should I mention the chronic repetitive strain injury incurred from years spent slumped over an ancient Olivetti or will this rigorous antidote work its magic?
This… hurts and I’m not talking about my shins. I’m not even talking about my heart. I’m talking about my hands, my neck, my thighs, my shoulders, even my ribs. Every element of my body is rising up in revolt. It’s a kind of revolution. Up in arms, you might call it. But my arms are pinned firmly to the floor as I raise one leg at a careful, ninety-degree angle to the floor and paint the air with my toe, backwards and forwards until the slyly insidious cramp pushes it down once again. Forget that childhood bible, My Life in Dance: roseate images of ballerinas executing flying fouettés en l’air, pages studded with gravity defying leaps and whirling dervishes. My Life in Pain, more like.
A ping as the yellow band jumps away.
`And thank you.’
I lace my elbows into a dubious prayer position, thanking myself for… getting this far without collapsing? Not grabbing my belongings and racing off before we’d even reached the floor? Persevering against the odds?
Instead, I find myself bending forward, acknowledging the day for getting through: factory processed or `cooked’, as Tara puts it. I do it because I do it because I do it. It’s more than a ritual, it’s a need, a structure, a framework on which to hang my sagging body. It’s another family, another port of call, another point in a restless day. A way of stretching my limbs as far as they can take it; as far as I can take it. It’s that thing peculiar to dancers. Or musicians. Tuning up. They call it a practice.
≈
Here she comes, clumping into the room in her thick socks and bulging jumper. Won’t that woman ever shut up? I don’t care if she plays the fiddle in an all-woman scratch band. I don’t care if she’s got osteoporosis. I don’t care if she can only do Downward Dog on her elbows. I just want to focus – on my own listing body, my inability to remain in an inverted V for longer than 30 seconds without encouraging a heart attack.
Dizziness, palpitations: these are all neighbours, friends I’ve come to regard as unwelcome witnesses, associates to my weekly ordeal, only staved off by a cool, inward breath – not a gasp – and a swift recourse to a glug of tap water, timed so’s not to miss the next, frankly easier exercise. God forbid I lose my chance to shine. I swallow, downing my fear, quieting my beating heart, resolve to take up meditation on a regular basis, not just an occasional half-hour aberration – and carry on.
I’ve lain down on this same spot for at least 15 years, looking up through the gabled window, watching the sky change from stormy to clear. Sometimes the trees are bare: chia-ros-cura, my mother would have called it as I lay in bed aged seven watching the moving shadows hit my bedroom wall, the one with a picture of the Queen pinned above the bed and the clunk clunk of the grid as a lone bicycle passed over it. I was wheezing but triumphant, for I’d managed to suffer the first ballet class without having an asthma attack, only the pink tablet rammed under my tongue to deflect the wheezes. The first class after the exam, that is.
≈
I can see Miss Jones flapping her arms behind the glass door. She demonstrates breathing in as if she’s swimming the Channel. The reputation of her dancing academy is built on 100% success, after all. Miss Grimshaw plays a plonking tune on the piano then throws her hands in the air before an imaginary audience. My legs could go on forever like elastic but now the lady with the tight bun and spindly metal spectacles is saying `en-chain-ments’.
`It’s just like typing, says Mum. Tick tock tick tock.
Now it’s the Spanish Jota. Miss Grimshaw gives me a nod and hammers her fingers on the piano. Swing up two three, down pas-de-basque twice, clack with pretend maracas and hit-your-legs-whilst-jumping. My ankles collide. There’ll be a stinging bruise. The woman is tapping her fingers on the desk.
`Can you show us Tears now, dear?’ My hands seem locked in Pray. I bend my head down and try to squeeze my face but the tears won’t come out. Maybe they’ve slid down the mirrors and gone down a crack in the lino.
`No, dear. That’s not Tears, is it?’ I shake my head and feel the tears coming all on their own. I hear a whooshing sound round the room. It sounds like a storm. The bun woman hands me a handkerchief over her desk. But I can’t get that far because I start to wheeze. Not the laughing wheeze when Dad does his bandy-legged chicken impersonation or even the Ribena wheeze because of the chemicals but the crying wheeze, when I suck in my breath and back it up with hundreds of tiny hiccups from the back of my chest till I’m about to burst.
The bun woman scrapes her chair back on the lino and rings the bell on her notepad. I lean against the big mirror. It’s freezing cold. I see a stick girl with scared eyes. We’re both gasping for breath.
`What happened? What’s the matter?’
I hear Mum screaming from the corridor. She runs in and rummages around in her handbag. She forces my neck back, rips the pink tablet out of its wrapper, shoves it under my tongue and races out to find a flannel.
`Never mind,’ says Miss Jones. `I suppose she can take it again next year.’
`They don’t like day dreamers,’ says Mum, as we step out into Renshaw St towards Lime St Station and the 81 bus home.
῀
`What is this wonderful jazz music?’ I ask daringly, breaking a concentrated silence harking back to Miles Davis and the hooter over the Hudson.
`It’s a compilation,’ replies Tara, not revealing her sources. She’s probably copyrighted her MP3 player, patented her very existence, her I Ching tattoos, her washboard stomach, her stern, warrior brain with its unlikely panther tattoo snaking up her inner left arm, the tiny butterfly revealed above her ankle beneath the sleek zebra tights.
I strive for Tara’s approbation which means her ignoring me as she beadily corrects every other person in the room, seemingly with closed, x-ray eyes. To be ignored is to be truly appreciated. No foot wrongly placed, no arm pulled out of its socket, no muscle anywhere else than where it should be, stomach pulled in on a light gradient of 40-degree tension as if I’m holding in my waterworks – the whole innards, in fact, front and back – but not the breath. Oh, no. That should remain smooth and flowing, manifesting in a loud hah or rather harrrrgh.
`You’re miles away! Your legs are in the completely wrong position. We’re onto Double Leg Stretch now, not the single one. Where were you? At the zoo? Your mind is working overtime as usual. Slow… down. No wonder you’re on those horrible tablets. Look at me! Six hours in the dental chair and still I carry on. Not a scratch.’
The woman is a Titan. Sewn together with wire wool and elastic. She’s ageless, a living example of the body in practice, defying gravity, time, space even weight. All those sabbaticals hanging upside down from a pulley seem to have had no deleterious side-effects. She has the strength of an ox and the laugh of a strangled cow.
`Come on! Back to civilisation! We’re only halfway through.’
Now we’re on the home slope. Sideways legs. We’ve tipped the halfway mark. Thirty minutes and it’ll all be over. I know this because stomach clenched, I strain to catch a glimpse of my neighbour’s watch on her left arm as it returns from its ambitious swoop.
`Ouch!’
`You’re sickling your foot – again,’ snaps Tara, slapping it to show me what she means. All dance teachers are harsh, the harsher the better. Discipline, rigour, focus, from the 82-year-old Madame Messerer I first interviewed thirty years ago, decanting a tradition she’d inherited from St Petersburg into the cramped basement studio opposite Selfridges. A lifetime of struggle and fame at the Kirov and the Bolshoi meted out in homeopathic doses.
We’re on a roll now – literally, taking the dreaded rubber ring beneath our ankles and swooping back and forth like a speeded-up snail on the wheel of a pendulum. I can feel every vertebra in my spine being massaged – not too fast or I’ll roll off the mat.
Yarrgh. I attempt to keep pace, zipping my legs up into the air in an inverted V shape, then grasping the ankles – or in my case, my thighs – and stretching up, up, up, head held high. Breathe IN. Don’t let go. Pushing my ankles behind my head. Well, she does. The Führer. I teeter and tremble on the verge of collapse, unwilling to yield. It’s a point of honour. A competition – with myself. To prove I can defeat gravity, pain or life itself. Perhaps yoga would be more suitable for my straining body? Less combative, more holistic, all embracing, just…slower? Though plumping for the soft option is still challenging when it comes to describing an aerial leg swing with one toe. I can do it – oh, yes – easily. But must I pay for it? Oh, yes: easily.
I may be about to fold my hands in grateful prayer, but in my mind’s eye, I’m already on the 277 bus heading home, opening the Saturday Guardian, scanning the news headlines on Gaza, mulling over how to pitch in and play my part, yawning with a familiar sense of satisfaction, complete even if the world is fragmenting and collapsing around me.
Gaza. I hear the cries of mothers witnessing their children being targeted by Israeli soldiers, see them hurtling their bodies in abandon against 17-year-old kids wearing helmets. The enormity of the brutality scares me. I sign my name, write my speeches but really I should be joining the people of the fence.
Instead, I’m lying flat on my back whilst resolving to assert my solidarity and do the Downward Dog. Today I will realign my body and tomorrow I will fight to get rid of the Tory government and banish petrol fumes. Tonight, I will breathe in and slowly breathe out until I’ve forgotten I have a political conscience at all.
All my life I’ve been trying to join the dots: body, politics, dance. EM Forster’s only connect. Hard to weave these parts of my life and personality into an impactive, meaningful whole: the political versus the movement: political movement. The body politic.
≈
`Look at you! Half in, half out,’ laughs Tara, snapping her fingers at my glazed eyes, pulling my foot into a straight line. `You’re twisting your foot like this, see?’ Strange how the mind can organise the body – badly, with limbs as recalcitrant soldiers on the lookout to disobey, in spite of their compliant nature.
I snap back into action, marshalling my legs into their supernatural state, slipping seamlessly into the old, familiar dance student mode. Relentlessly at the barre at 8.30 each morning, five at the afternoon still marking time, mind disengaged. Ironic, that I can so disembody my mind. It’s a trick dancers learn. Iron grip discipline. Haughty, determined, steely. I squint at my watch. Only fifteen minutes to go. Side bends over, almost time for the Cool Down. I’m … so….dizzy. Benign hyper… benign hyper… ventilating…
`Paroxysmal vertigo,’ finishes my neighbour to the right, sporting a hand splint and stretchy knee bandage. `I’ve had it too. Everyone’s got it. Everyone over 60, that is. You just have to go through this special procedure. You hang upside down over a bed then swerve your head sharply to the left while the rest of your body lists to the right. It takes about three tries, apparently but a doctor can do it professionally in a couple of jerks. It does tend to come back though. But then nothing is permanent, is it – except death?’ I throw her a cold smile, grit my teeth and crane my neck under my left arm whilst attempting to move into the inverted Giraffe Pose.
`Take your hand away from your head,’ screams the Führer. `What do you want to do? Break your neck? I’ve told you before. Don’t – run – before – you – can – walk. Lie flat immediately. I’m tired of telling you. You’re meant to be one of my regulars. It’s no wonder you’ve got whatever it is you’ve got. Stop fooling around and drink collagen.’ I turn to my neighbour two mats down, the one with the false eyelashes that last six weeks.
`It plumps up the fascia,’ she mouths. `Completely transforms your appearance. Look at me! But honestly – you don’t need it. You are my role model. I wish I could look like you, once I’m your age…’
The smell of frying bacon permeates the room. There’s a family out there enjoying a leisurely Saturday morning breakfast without any hint of an exercise plan. No martyrdom for them.
`Every bloody week!’ shouts Ida with the legwarmers. `I’m choking. It’s disgusting. I come here to take a break. And now look. It’s sickening.’
Tara flaps her arms around the room, setting up her incense saucer and scrabbling in her bag for a lighter. The scent of bacon-infused jasmine fills the room. It’s a battle. The bacon wins but we’re past the last hurdle and now I really am flat on my back, pulling my bent toes towards me with the unforgiving yellow band. Mustard rather than yellow. Important to be precise. I sail through the Wind Down leg stretches in a daze. I may have been doing them for fifteen years but as with tai chi, sometimes forget the whole sequence, dodging in and out of the fragments, attempting to weave them together like bits of frayed wallpaper.
`And sweep your arms over your head in a wi-de circle across your shoulders and over your head, bringing them down into the final prayer position.’ She bows. We all bow, grateful to have reached the end, to have survived, to have inflated our bodies with a cocktail of air, light and oxygen, minds already rushing to the kaffee klatsch ahead.
‘And thank you.’ I hear my tai chi teacher’s voice signing off as she thanks her students, Confucius and any other existential powers to whom she defers.
`Sometimes, when I leave you all and walk out along the Euston Road, I feel as if I’m bouncing along on springs…corkscrews of air. Tai chi is all about circles, you see. It’s the moving body embracing a still mind, whereas yoga deals with the still body holding a moving mind. That’s the difference.’
Would she approve of my speed tai chi, racing against the clock to release currents of air, rendering me hovering above ground as I flash an imaginary sword in in my ongoing teenage film clip: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or rather: Red Detachment of Women?
≈
`Go on, kid. Do yer stuff,’ shouts Dad. I pull out my beret and pretend the school badge is a red star. I take a deep breath and chuck my arms above my head.
First, I’m the slave girl chained to her post. I grab the tyrant’s whip and kick him into the dungeon on tiptoe. Next I’m the tyrant. I stride around with bendy legs, smash my fists together and strike a blow to my own head. The tyrant beckons me back, so I turn my fingers into claws and prowl round in a circle.
Now it’s the Wrestling Match. I twist round and bite the tyrant’s arm then kick him with my heel. Suddenly I hear soldiers so try to dodge him by jumping from side to side with fast, light steps like Miss Jolly showed me last lesson. She says I’m the best dodger in our class.
I jump on my horse, right into Mrs O’Shea’s front parlour. I turn round and gallop back like a battalion of 26 militia bouncing on their saddles. This is called BRANDISH SWORD WITH MILITANT SHOUT. I wave at myself as the slave girl.
Mrs O’Shea keeps glancing at her watch and nipping out to check the sausage rolls. Wilf Wagstaff shouts `bravo!’ so I kick away the tyrant pistol with a pointed toe, grab Mum’s fish knife and plunge it into his heart. I add a few wolves howling and hyenas screeching. Then I pull the cord on a hand grenade and fling it over the tyrant’s head. It just misses Dad’s head as he gets up to stretch his legs. I place an imaginary beret over my left eye and unroll a banner. I stare into the distance, looking right through Mrs O’Shea’s curtains all the way along Maple Terrace.
`Onward, Onward! Onward To Victory! The Torrent Of The Revolution Cannot Be Stemmed!’ I shout three times. To shut me up, Mrs O’Shea offers me a beaker of Lucozade with a straw. Reggie Lambert asks me what I want to be when I leave school. I say doctor or dentist instead of a ballet dancer or hairdresser as I know it would please Mum and Dad. He says I’m the Youth and the Voice of the Future.
≈
I lie here and wonder where have all the years gone. Why do I stretch the yellow band over the flexed sole of one horizontally raised foot, the other foot pointed at floor level till I feel my body must be about to break? Week after week, why do I organise an early night to be fresh for this eternal striving for perfection, the mirage in the desert, the illusion of wholeness: the holy Grail?
Is it a defence against ageing, pushing back the tide? Is it the need to show off, the urge to surpass every other woman in the room in terms of flexibility, aesthetics, streamlined figure, even if they’re thirty years younger than me, in my desire to prove I’m still in the running, still able to hold my head up high, spine erect, eyes straight forward, waist sleek as a… grapefruit – all held in by paper and string or something stronger, hoping against hope I have the stamina and strength and won’t need to dash to the loo, just as we’re about to mark through the Downward Dog for the fifteenth time, hoping I can hold my own, that the time will pass faster than the speed of light. I have paid in advance after all.
I’m here because I’m here because I’m here. It’s a place to bolt to when there’s nothing I can mend except my body. A refuge. A time and a space to unclog, unravel my snared-up brain, to let go in spite of myself. It’s a marker, a constant, a still point in a turning world.
Wham! I’m lying flat with my arms in an upturned box shape flat on the ground when suddenly, no warning, the room spins. I jerk up like a jack in the box, head pushed into my hands. The spin subsides. Gingerly, I reach for the floor, lever myself down and aim once more to invert my shaking arms.
Again it turns, a whirlwind hitting me from the side. I’m battered by a hurricane, body thrown overboard, floating dizzily with no anchor. I ricochet up, ram my head into my hands. Tara races up.
‘I saw it coming! Thank God you didn’t keel over and crack your forehead on the floor and knock yourself out with double concussion. I’ve seen it happen before – twice.’
She rushes to grab me a bottle of water from the machine. I describe a wavy rectangle above my head, abandoning any attempt at rational thought or movement.
I’ve got a leak, I attempt to signal. And it’s getting worse. It’s travelling down from top to bottom. There’s a mushroom growing at my feet. I’m not talking about my body. I’m talking about the cellar, the infernal den where dangerous smells coagulate and water gushes. What do I know about the internal plumbing of a house? I don’t even have an insight into the workings of my own body. How can one live in a building without knowing how to mend it when it falls apart? Everything relies on a wingful of faith. It’s an act of madness – and dodgy on the financial front. Why didn’t I take a Masters in DIY rather than fiddling around with a dance qualification – and what about emergency insurance?
‘And thank you.’
Tara’s voice is repeating the mantra. Why is everyone clapping as if we’re at the premiere of Don Giovanni at the Met? This happens every week. Yet it’s a one-off, every week a new story, every session a new trial, a new challenge, a new loss.
I remember lying here years before the end of a long relationship. I looked grey then, distracted, you could say, melancholic because I knew the future ahead was hazy and the past sunshine was a far-off glow. I came here the day I ended that relationship, feeling guilty and blank and patiently waiting for joy to flood through me, the energy to race back, to remind me that I was alive once again, that I’d recaptured my hunger for life, so carelessly laid aside.
But in place of joy, there was a dullness and emptiness, a lack even of conversation. It would be two years before that energy trickled back, growing into a flood, then like thunder exploding all around me in a burst of colour. Two years whilst I returned, Saturday by Saturday and lay flat on my back on the same mat, my face upturned to the accommodating sky above me, autumn drifting into winter, winter fading into spring, spring accelerating into summer, summer sliding once more into autumn.
Only the music changed, from half recognisable jazz to ancient Indian ragas to funky rock. I liked the rock. I liked the upbeat. I liked to slide along with the music swooping out into the sunshine. I wasn’t keen on the classical: too painful, too plangent, too bloody deep. I needed to skate along the surface of my emotions until finally, one day, without warning, I felt flashes of optimism and realisedI was hungry for life, ready to move.
῀
I’ve missed it! The fixed point in my week – Saturday morning at 10.30 am. Leave the house by ten, race for the bus before it appears, , throw some newsprint in front of my eyes, jump off at Victoria Park, thrust £2.90 at the solicitous newsagent who appraises the state of my body more realistically than I can, grab the Saturday Guardian, wishing I could read it there and then, walk briskly to my House of Punishment, mount the stairs, hoping the music hasn’t already started.
But now I’ve forgone the whole thing. The fingers of the kitchen clock tick round so slowly as if time has stood still and waits for me to waver, peel on my five quid leopard skin tights with the matching top from Ridley Road market, my special exercise socks, my crossover jumper because it’s chilly. I’m always freezing out of the sunshine, even in the middle of summer. Like my daily clock, my body clock is all awry. And now I’m left with a gaping hole at the beginning of the day. I’ve let go of the thread that keeps me spinning, binds me into a package of nerves, ligaments, muscles and brain, coalesces all disparate elements into something that feels dynamic by 11.45 every Saturday morning, whenever I manage to make it.
Last week, I had a good excuse. My grandson wanted me to take him to the skate park and afterwards for a kimchi wrap and banana, mango and lychee smoothie. En route, he’d practice his bodybuilding moves on the outdoor gymnasium. This is an easy ride, I mused, as he extended his limbs in an enviable, birdlike swoop over the concrete slabs, slapping his board over to pounce on it with a defiant yess! Far easier than lifting my legs in a forty-five degree turn without sickling my foot.
Easier but harder, because now the internal struggle erupts: the conscience, the cop in the head as Theatre of the Oppressed maestro Augusto Boal puts it. You’ve let yourself down. No backbone. Do you want to end up with a dowager’s hump?
I’ll do the exercises tonight, watching television even if I’m dog tired. I’ll do the tai chi run whilst watching the ten o’clock news. It’s not too late to cover my tracks and pack it all in, resurrect the figure slumping away from me into the bowels of late middle age. It’s not too late to take charge, pull myself together and just jump on. I do it because I do it because I do it.
I haven’t mentioned the counterpoint, the antithesis: the non-stretch: the days and weeks when the body lies redundant, slack, slothful, the mind racing ahead, fixing onto other agendas, other obsessions: anything to pull away from the job in hand: the body. At first it doesn’t seem to matter, head swivelled in one direction then another, solving new crises. After all, one is running. That’s exercise, isn’t it? At least the mind and heart are racing along with the legs.
But it’s the legs that disobey as they seize up, the stiffness that greets the day, the body attempting to jerk into action then slamming back into itself like a jack knife, the first few minutes walking across the room bent double, staring at the floor because the lower spine refuses to upend itself.
And then it’s the back that clamours for attention, making itself known at every bump and bend. No more racing up escalator steps. But it’s not just the legs. It’s the lungs: that full capacity when air courses through your body, turning it into an aerated balloon. That’s all over. The puff and exhaustion needed to slog up step after step just isn’t worth it. Why not slump, pretending to read the adverts as they flash past in the boring monotony of non-movement? As days turn into weeks, there’s always another diversion. Weeks turn into months and you think: shall I just give this up forever? Is it all too much? Here, now, I’m on a different kind of prison stretch, locked into a seventy-five minute boot camp.
`I do wonder,’ murmured another Pilates devotee last week after I‘d creaked back following months of non-attendance, `if it’s worth carrying on at all. It takes me longer and longer to recover. Perhaps it’s just…old age?’
`Mmm,’ I replied. `I know what you mean.’
And it was then that I decided not to miss a day incrementally: Pilates, tai chi, yoga, swing: anything to keep the wheels oiled. It’s like maintaining a car, they say. You wouldn’t think of ignoring the carburettor or the clutch? Just keep those brakes in good order, pull in slack muscles, oil your knackered joints and you’ll be zipping around the corner in no time.
Merce Cunningham didn’t stop working for 70 years. Ironic that flexing muscles for over half a century should lead to crippling arthritis. Perhaps I’ll shrink like my grandmother who ended up at four foot six by the age of 93. Osteoarthritis: the ball in the socket, as my brother used to mime, grinding fist into cupped hand.
≈
Unwillingly, I step off the bus, thinking: now, now shall I turn back and reclaim the day: cook and read, clean and write – and relax? I make a quick calculation. One hour’s exercise gives me two hours’ energy time; one week’s Pilates equals two weeks’ productive work. Again the cult of the individual, as my father would have said, selfless to the last. The cult of the body.
But it’s more about the energy it releases, the mental clarity, the spurt of reclaimed, renewed determination, the buoyant jolliness that no sudden misadventure can dent. I can flex my inner muscles, feel a sense of their burgeoning power, grab onto taut pulleys of alertness just within my grasp, move mountains and still have time to seize the day.
I remember that feeling from the rare nights throwing my body about without fear of retribution, forgetting my gammy hip, my aching back, dancing like the livewire I’ve always been, grabbing the air to wrench from it every last spark of joy.
I recall it from that dusty moment on the beach at Bagur on the Costa Brava, watching my daughter and her friend Rosetta sweep their bodies into delirious starfish on the sand, arms circling into shells, giggling as the water creeps in, waves glistening into foam, dusk turning into a twinkling night that will last for ever. Angels in the Snow.
I know it from every glorious moment I’ve thrown caution to the winds, suffered embarrassed frowns turning to toe tapping acknowledgement zooming to wide-eyed attention as I threw off my shoes and danced at any conceivable opportunity. For I was born to move. I was chucked out of my mother’s womb dancing, arms flailing, legs twisting in impossibly contorted shapes. I was so impatient to hit the air, I knocked out the midwife trying to cut the cord.
Jumping in to follow the intricate step patterns of the Sardana, drunk on the potent night air against a backdrop of spluttering fireworks shooting up like peacocks from the beach at Cadaques then stepping into the stately jigging circle at Barcelona’s cathedral steps; dancing the Russian gopek at my twenty first birthday party, kicking out one high booted leg, counterbalancing it with a devilish flourish of the arms; throwing my body into a reckless Charleston on a cramped and slippery bedroom floor at midnight to whoops from a ring of drunken students; enticed into rock’n roll aged fifteen at Mrs Casey’s Friday night Communist Party social.
≈
I sense hot breath on my neck and close my eyes. Someone is turning me round and
round as if they’re unswaddling baby Jesus. When I open my eyes, a ring of boys dressed like Bill Haley stand around me. They’re kitted out in drape jackets and drainpipes, brothel creepers and bootlace ties – and every single Teddy boy has his hand stretched out as if he wants to shake mine.
`You choose,’ I say, closing my eyes again. I feel two hands slide round my waist. I’m in someone’s arms. I haven’t chosen him but it doesn’t seem to matter because now I’m all Signed Up. I swing my arms out, flick one foot into the air and kick the other foot back. I let the mystery person grab me in his arms. Her throws me from side to side, backwards and forwards till he’s knocked the breath clean out of me.
From far away, I can hear Mum shouting,
`Where’s her tablets?’
But I just ignore her. I carry on rocking. Stuff Swan Lake. And stuff the Party social. I’m going forward into the future with Elvis.
I was born to rock ‘n’ roll. My early obstetric adventures stood me in good stead. I could swoop beneath my partner’s legs and end up doing a backflip, petticoats flying, still managing to keep one hand on his shoulder, the other swiping the air for equilibrium. And all with no repercussions whatsoever. No back pain. No hip pain. No knee pain. Instead: freedom. Light as a bird flying through the annals of culture.
No retribution for a dancing bumblebee for Harlech Television; a Liverpudlian dog called Leopold for Little Angel Puppet Theatre, Islington; an animated armchair and express train in Incredible Johnnie Banger at the Unicorn; disembodied mime with Friends Roadshow at Oval House, Kennington; hapless clown Vanilla in the Ken Campbell inspired School for Clowns for Liverpool Everyman.
Or marooned in a hangar in Hammersmith as finalist on Opportunity Knocks circa 1968 with prima ballerina Trisha Gibbins kitted out in red leotard and black tights, me in black leotard and red tights waiting our turn. The first contestant, a teenage ice skater with a ponytail and flared mini skirt tap, dances on a shoebox like an automaton, her back facing Hughie Green.
`Turn around, dear,’ he says. ` Forget about the wall. We’re your audience now.’
A would-be singer in his seventies, hopelessly out of tune, careers on. Hughie gently waves him towards the exit and out into the street, slamming the door shut before he can return to yodel further. Now it’s our turn to shake hands with Alicia Markova’s sister Doris Barry and Lionel Blair’s sister Joyce before launching into our Chattanooga Choo Choo train dance, Andrews Sisters version:
`Dinner in the diner, nothing could be finer
Than to have your ham ‘n’ eggs in Carolina…’
Still the remnants flicker up from the cracks with no diminishing of shine, no deleterious side-effects. Movement and dance. A lifetime’s engagement, a lifetime’s recollection, the pulse, the beat, the volition. Dancing to give life. Dancing to save life, to keep alive what is no longer there. The soul bursting free.
I hover outside, savouring the warm, early evening air but instead find myself pushing through the old swing doors, pressing my index finger onto the bell which doesn’t ring. There’s still time to turn back, no face lost but – as if propelled – I trot tunnel vision into an ice-cold studio where the chill still permeates from the cranky air conditioning fan in the corner. I glance at the clock. Only fifty-five minutes to go till countdown and freedom.
A few people expectantly chatting, exchanging up-to-date gossip and there laid out is the small ring, the difficult stretch band, the two blocks, the long thin smelly mat but not the thick blue one, which I have to fetch for myself, stepping over other people’s fingers and toes in an effort to save time.
`Don’t tread on my new mats! Haven’t I told you before? Why are you always in such a rush? Good job you haven’t missed the warm up – again. And don’t step over my new mats! Tiptoe around them. How many more times? And next time, look after your PVC or whichever of the numerous complaints you’ve got BEFORE you come to class.’
`It’s BPV, actually. Benign paroxysmal vertigo,’ I mutter but Tara is in full flood.
`I’ve told you before. Don’t ignore your body.’
Dammit. Someone’s taken my spot: the best vantage point where I can lie flat on the ground and look up through the skylight of this top floor of an old forge and be greeted by the trees bursting into bud. In winter, the sky grey or sleetish, guarding the clouds. Still, a bright burst of sunshine, the familiar reek of bacon frying from the open window above the cracked basin where sometimes I’m forced to race in the hope that a glug of water will reignite me back to life and zest in health and youth perhaps.
Was that the revving of a motorbike coming from below, scratching out the music? No, worse. They are tarmacking the road and the smell has permeated our lungs as we deep breathe in … and out…
It’s that dizziness again. The ground swirls. My head spins. Swiftly I jam my hands behind my spinning head and lever it inches off the floor. If ever you feel dizzy, I remember from my dance school days, just jump up and do a fouetté or bounce on the spot. That generally cures it. Until the next time. Or spin round the other way. The important thing is to regain equilibrium.
Ah, that elusive word. The thin line between standing tall and toppling over. I breathe deeply in an attempt to stabilise my whirling brain. The over-exertion elevates the whooziness in my head till I’m inflated with air like a tipsy omelette. I’m trying too hard. There’s nothing for it but to lie still till the whole thing collapses around me.
`Why have you stopped? I haven’t let you off the hook – yet.’
`I feel dizzy.’
`I told you. It’s all that rushing around. What did you have for breakfast today? Nothing, I imagine. You need some good strong protein to tide you over. You’re far too thin as it is. Look at those arms.’
`She needs more collagen,’ shouts Eyelashes. `Here. Have my banana. It’s a bit squashed `cause I’ve kept it in my handbag for later but no. You can have it. Take. It’s full of potassium. You should really have some hot liquid with it but I mean, you are my role model after all.’
`Why? I’m thirty years older than everyone else. What is it that turns me into your heroine?’
`Oh, but just look at you,’ she marvels. `Those legs, that figure, those boobs. Eat that banana. Finish it off with a swig from the tap. A bit of rust can’t hurt you.’
I want to run – far away – where I don’t have to respond to any nagging jibs and jibes. Just five more minutes, I promise myself as I slurp the freezing, metallic-tasting water. I Imagine I’m floating. Sometimes I’m in Syria or with Tara on her safari to the Thai boot camp retreat where she’s hanging upside down from a wooden pole.
The tarmac gritters’ grind has subsided, the motorcycle has ceased its bravado revving. I’m zigzagging back and forward through time, back to that rainy moment when I was a dance drama warrior at Llandaff Cathedral, overlarge tin helmet obliterating my eyes. It was freezing and we were heathens.
Will I ever be free of my body, soaring into the clouds like a sturdy, germinating plant pushing through the soil to gulp air and unfold, seize the moment, all ready to go: pow? Like a balloon skittering out of control, I want to escape my bearings and zoom off into the unknown, on impulse to jump on a plane and visit my long-mourned relatives from the former East Germany who have disappeared behind a grey wall of silence, a damp fog that still clings to the air like disappointment, a claggy, noisy silence robbed of the colour that once was, the colour of make believe, the imagined colour of childhood.
I spent fifteen years as a dance journalist racing up and down the country capturing every moving spectacle from Bhangra to Bolshoi. Looming out is that vivid day when Thatcher stood down and the country was jubilant. Flashes of a teary-eyed PM outside 10 Downing Street, the Daimler revving up in the cold, people dancing outside, the end of a hard winter – or just the beginning.
It’s during the old days at the Times Educational Supplement before Murdoch takes over, slashing union membership and cushioned, upmarket travel. I’m off to interview a choreographer running a dance residency at a redbrick campus in the Midlands. Early morning.
I’ve bagged the end of an empty, first-class carriage when in walks Tony Benn, hair combed with a neat side parting. He jams a pipe into his mouth and carefully lays out an array of morning newspapers over his `desk’. I catch sight of a pair of intelligent eyes scrutinising mine, sliding away to read the spread: Maggie Maggie Maggie Out Out Out! Tears for Souvenirs. She’s Gone. What Next?
I’m on shpilkes. I have to distract him. Only connect after all. A familiar aroma reaches my nostrils. My father used to smoke Clan tobacco too. I lean forward and tap his arm.
`Excuse me, but I have to shake your hand. I’ve photocopied more of your articles and passed them on to friends than I care to remember.’
`Oh, good,’ he responds encouragingly. `I was so hoping I’d meet someone I could talk to. Now what do you do? I’ve got three sons and I’m happy to say, they’re all political.’ I forage for something meaningful to say.
`Enough to form the next Labour Cabinet, we hope.’ He smiles at my eager joke. `And my father, he’s been in the Communist Party for the last sixty years. I think he’s appeared on platforms with you.’
`The CP. Such a pity. Just as they were winning – and look what’s happened now. Marvellous. She’s been defeated. First the miners and now this. For once, I was speechless. She set in motion forces she couldn’t control. Look at Gorbachev and the Berlin Wall.’
`What do you think will happen now?’
`Oh, I don’t think it matters which of the pygmies win. And as for Kinnock: what a disgraceful speech. To talk for forty minutes without even mentioning the Gulf. A golden opportunity lost.’ I struggle to keep the conversation afloat. He’s accommodating until the train takes off, when he settles back, taking a sheaf of papers from his briefcase along with a plastic flask.
`And now,’ he says, `I must concentrate on this,’ as he pours himself a beaker of tea. He rearranges his papers and set his alarm clock, allotting the opposite seats for his Financial Times and Mirror: an everyday ritual.
I stumble out to the dining car. I need to let someone know – anyone. I am part of history, after all. A waiter points me in the direction of the spanking new telecom machine. Daringly, I produce my card and slid it in, feeling well-organised and au fait with modern travel. A depressing whirr emanates from the mouthpiece, then deadness. I crane my neck up. Out of Order winks back a pencil-written sign designed for six footers. I career back.
Elder statesman is absorbed with his tape recorder, sliding down into his chair before falling into an easy, well-oiled sleep. I try to rearrange my own reading material. Should I reveal that I’d once played karate chopping Jane in Willy Russell’s One for the Road at the Pomegranate Chesterfield, his home constituency? Some sixth sense forces me to hold my own counsel and let Tony Benn sleep. But as the train sneaks into Leicester station and I silently rise from my seat to gather my coat and rucksack, I waver. I have to act fast. I bend down to grasp his sleeping hand.
`Goodbye. It’s been such a pleasure to meet you.’ Opening one spaniel eye, he squeezes my wrist warmly back.
`Take very good care of yourself,’ he smiles and returns to his musings.
Meeting Tony Benn the day Thatcher resigned and sharing his excitement was my zenith moment. There’s not much excitement to share now, what with Covid, Brexit, the Tories and Labour Party politics in disarray but that encounter remains the lodestar of my itinerant, freelance years.
≈
And then there was Zumba.
`You’ll love Zumba,’ says Mediterranean. `It’s pure dance. And you with your legs and that body. Whoah! You just swing your hips and hulahoop. It’s so easy.’
But why no space to gasp for breath? And why do teachers clap themselves at the end of every number, forcing us to join in when there’s nothing to applaud? It’s coercion, whipping people up into a frenzy before leaving in their tight shorts and muscly biceps. Pure ostentation, with no health benefits bar clapped-out lungs, sprained ankles and twisted torsos.
‘But it’s sexy.’
`It’s immoral.’
≈
I’m scudding along, the soles of my bare feet slapping the unsprung dance floor, hitting the floor like a staple gun: an expressive dance class for over fifties in a church in Clapton transformed into a buzzing community centre. Heels skidding on the polished wood veneer, I’m lost in a Chopin polonaise.
`We give out and we take back,’ demonstrates the dance teacher. He’s a rangy, mischievous, ruminating South African in his early forties who seems lost in the moment himself. Without warning, I feel a strange sensation in my stomach – or is it my heart?
‘We give out so much. Now’s the time to take it all back,’ he carries on, sounding more tai chi master than choreographer.
Fleetingly, I feel the movement of the soul connecting with the body in flight. Those wordless movements: throwing and gathering have touched a chord. A current of air has passed through the room, through my own body and out through the open window.
Note to self: practise tai chi every day: in the garden, in my head, learn to do it on the left-hand side and not just the right. No wonder my heavily overused right side is so painfully stiff. And now’s the time to take it all back.
I’m remembering Sympathetic Magic, my solo cabaret incarnating Madame Fanfulla, a tattered busker operating on the streets of Paris with faithful dresser Serge, recounting her glory days: a life in dance partnering Nijinsky and possibly the Tsar.
Who is that mysterious woman standing alone on the steps of Montmartre?
Was she, long ago, a grande dame of the theatre or is she living in a half-remembered fantasy world, wrapped in her own, exotic dreams?
Among the twinkling lights of the boulevard, Madame Contessa Tatiana Semyaronovitch Fanfulla (semi-retired) relives her extraordinary life in her world-famed creation THE HISTORY OF DANCE: Part One: 16th-20th Century.
The story unfolds from a miniature wardrobe and a long, if faulty memory, framed by a fairy lights installation of garden brollies. Thirty memorable highlights from Minuet to Turkey Trot, `Giselle’ to Nijinsky, Isadora to Charleston, Tap to Tango and other show hits. A personal story of triumph and tears.
`If you carry on like this,’ warned an osteopath, forcing me to look into his long mirror without flinching, `you’ll be in a wheelchair by the time you’re 50.’
I’m striving to the hilt, in competition with every other body in the room, forcing them to realise that I’m the only one, albeit thirty years older, who can achieve a perfect, aesthetically pleasing pose. Only I understand Joseph Pilates and his original 1956 conception: to turn a body weakling into Tarzan. I truly am his Jane, striving like that seven-year-old ballet student to stretch my foot until it can reach no further, to dislocate my arm from its shoulder in one long, elegant port de bras.
It’s the snootiness in me, the desire to perform more elegantly than anyone else, to
achieve a sinuous line in full extension, opening my heart to absorb the quasi-Bach floating from Tara’s MP3. I’m haughtily performing at the Mariinsky Theatre, demonstrating this frozen moment in full glory from a stage ten feet above an adoring audience catching its breath at my every move – just as I performed for revered prima ballerina Beryl Grey as she arrived to judge our Sunshine Blind Babies competition at the Central Hall on Renshaw Street, barely two minutes from Lime Street Station.
I shiver, again witnessing this majestically upholstered Dame walk through those art deco revolving doors, up the stairs and onto our modest, rickety, wooden stage. I inhale the smell of her perfume, the sickly, resin-like scent that floats around her as she approaches our hastily assembled line above the footlights, me at the far end on account of my diminutive size, as she graciously presents each of us with a bronze medal for aspiring to be ten year-old Liverpudlian ballerinas.
I stretch now as I stretched then, one arm hurtling to the sky, emulating Dickie Lewis, Jacob Epstein’s Liverpool Resurgent sculpture revealed gloriously naked outside Lewis’s department store opposite the Adelphi Hotel, We’d pass it giggling as we turned into `The Studio’ across the road – till disapproving dowagers had Big Dickie covered up.
`And thank you.’
I’m remembering Dickie as I stand entranced, unconsciously pulling up my back till I can feel the sinews pulse with life.
≈
It’s a cool morning. I’m visiting the Tate’s new Rodin exhibition, marvelling at his x-ray ability to render human figures into sensual life. His massive, sculpted world expands my own. The power and fragility of those intent and throbbing, half broken figures suffuses my body. I feel majestic, sentient and all-powerful.
῀
I enter the piercingly cold studio with the air conditioning hissing in my direction and the thump of weight lifting music assaulting my left ear from the converted garage opposite. There’s nowhere to hide.
`Why are you half an hour late? Have you warmed up yet?’
`Well, I’ve been dashing about all day because….’
`Dashing about is not the same thing as warming up. Go and do Camel in the changing room.’
`But it’s freezing in there.’
`It’s freezing in here, an’ all.’
Swiftly, I drop onto all fours in an equipment room smelling of rubber and sweat. I don’t feel like a camel. Camels are tall and loping with proud necks in spite of their humps, whereas I’m small and tentative.
`Finished yet?’
`N…n…n.. not quite.’
`Well, go into Squats and don’t forget to stick your bum out.’
῀
`You can come and join in now. Why are you so agitated? You’re everywhere but in this class. I bet you’re already thinking what you’re gonna have for dinner tonight, aren’t you?’
Food is the last thing on my mind. I’ll never be hungry again. I’ve just lost my best specs – the turquoise designer ones in the orange case costing a hundred and fifty quid and I can’t afford the excess on insurance. I can hardly see your face, just feel your ranting disapproval bristling down my neck. Is that good enough or would you prefer a blow by blow on the inner lining of my entrails, entangled in their inter-fascial glory? Friction, the new buzzword.
I’m at war – and not just with you. There are knives cutting through this stomach of mine. They’re flying from ear to ear, conveniently bypassing my face but lodging themselves hungrily behind my temples. So don’t you dare tell me to shape up because I’m ready to kill. Even if I can’t see a bloody thing.
‘We’re onto Double Leg Stretch now, but as you’re neither one thing nor the other, you’d better start from scratch. Go back to Level One. Level Twos and Threes follow me. And remember. `What’s it all about?’
`Well, it’s… it’s… it’s…’
`It’s all about the core. The inner core. That’s why you need to con-cen-trate.’
`My! You’re strong,’ says the Führer, playfully tapping my arm. `Look at those legs. What have you been doing?’ That sense of being able to effortlessly achieve every exercise thrown at me, witness my limbs obeying of their own accord sans effort. In a twinkle, they’ve regrouped forces, shone up their uniform and are ready at the slightest toe tap to jump into action.
The adrenalin released from working those muscles, moving to the beat, dancing to a rhythm: the life force. The vital chi. After such a class, I can move mountains, run from here to Hackney Wick, jump into any conversation and make it sparkle. I am restless and ready to fly and miraculously, those heavyweight teachers have it in their power to help me.
`See? I look after you all, don’t I? I’m not such a vixen after all. We’re peace-loving animals here. And look at you! Those muscles! But push down your shoulders, see. Like this. Ye-es. You’re looking fit. It’s just your core we have to worry about. It’s like jelly.’ She prods me as if she’s at a cattle pound. ` Hold it IN. You’re strong but you’re lazy. Stomach IN. Work that core. Slow…down.’
The music begins. I want to kick my heels and trip my feet on a sympathetic parquet floor for hours without stopping, effortlessly light and fleet footed. Fun. The antithesis of this, the body dutiful. I prefer the body anarchic but first I must attend to the body obedient, currently moulded into a twisted corkscrew. Inside, I’m dancing the twist and throwing out my flailing arms, skimming the air with a lightness I can only call ethereal. The sheer pleasure of cutting a swathe through space. The non-linear approach. Having stretched every muscle in one’s body till nerves and sinews are tingling, breath coursing through me like a tropical Gulfstream.
At last, to be free of one’s body. To have extended it beyond all doubt. To have utilised every ounce of energy and zip, widened one’s reach, extended beyond the limits of one’s personal kinesphere, to have felt glowingly alive and relaxed. I’ve earned my spurs. I can fall asleep now without guilt. I have achieved my goal. Now I can go out and campaign against Trump, against Brexit, against this bitterly convoluted Tory government. Now, now, now.
Waveringly, I leave for the comfort of the evening breeze, carefully stepping ball toe, ball toe, clinging to the metal banister, not trusting for any slight, untoward slip of the tongue or foot. I do it because I do it because I do it. I hear the urgency of the crowds marching down Regent Street, their cries accelerating as in my mind’s eye, I run to join them.
Stepping off the bus, I skid on the shard of a cracked record, an outsize single by the Osmonds: Love Me For A… I shift my left foot along the wet pavement…Reason. A few paces on, Dexy’s Midnight Runners slices my shin. I turn the corner – and feel the crunch of black splinters piercing the soles of my trainers. Time to change the gramophone record. Danger everywhere, even from below.
Six months later…
Covid. The age of movement by proxy. Long-distance, self-isolating zoom. The turning point. Wobbling, half stretching, lying muted and uncorrected by an echoing voice somewhere in the ether. This can go either way: inertia leading to aching joints and ultimate immobility, or a frenetic desire to affirm a state of movement, a determination to fight against nature, nurture, the whole damn lot.
Movement rather than stasis, the only way to go. Now I’m forever throwing myself into the nearest pick me up: the six-week physio course competing with a group of participants a third my age, feeling smug about the sensation of strength in my backside, thighs and femur before falling flat without warning.
Pushing myself a step too far, I embark on half hour ballet and contemporary dance zoom classes, clutching a chair every morning at nine. For hadn’t I slogged at the barre at Miss Jones’s Dance Studio along with George Melly only sixty years earlier, running through endless demi-plies and endless ronds de jambes en l’air?
It was the turnout that did it. Flexible I may be, but an over elastic hip joint refuses to snap back into synchronised action, making every morning a trial of mind over matter. Will the creaking hip give way? Will my right leg buckle beneath me? Will the pain be so intense to make standing not a useful exercise at all? This is the lot of us early movers throwing our bodies around without thought for the present or near future, a hot bath with Epsom salts the daily sanctuary without which we could not survive. The wheelchair beckons.
`You should use a stick,’ said a friend. `It helps me enormously.’
I don’t want a stick. I just need to hone unreliable willpower to propel my body along. Walking does it, throwing one step in front of another, oiling the joints. Could a private physio or personal trainer keep me on the tightrope, conserving energy to maintain a taut, toned and fluid, if restless body and mind? You could say movement ruined my life. You might say dance saved my life. But where is the balance? How to maintain equilibrium when one is longing to fly? (Norma Cohen: Jan, 2023)