by Eleanor Wood
When I discover there is an open all-abilities yoga class every morning at 7 a.m., I decide to try and go as much as possible. Only if I can be bothered. I do not set my alarm – I’m on holiday, after all – but miraculously, I manage to wake up in time to go to the class every single morning. That might be because we’re going to bed pretty early. But also, I soon find that I really, really want to go to yoga every day. And my fears of Insta-ready ‘self-care’ bollocks turn out to be very much unfounded.
I take to going to sleep with the curtains slightly open every night, so that the light will wake me up in the morning. It cuts a wedge-shape of pure concentrated sunshine onto my camp bed every day, which is delightful to wake up to. Nan sleeps like the dead so I don’t have to worry too much about disturbing her. I immediately peek out onto the balcony every day to check out the beach view.
Before I go out every morning, I wake up Ann – as long as I’m up anyway, she’s asked me to act as her early morning alarm call. While I’m at yoga each day, she uses the time to go for a long walk. She often meets me on the way back from my yoga class, where we will walk and chat together.
I quietly clean my teeth and throw on the same Prince T-shirt and ancient grey gym shorts every day. My hair stays in the same plait for pretty much a week at a time. On the walk to the yoga studio – well, it’s actually a sort of pavilion with a roof but no walls – I check my messages, to see if there’s anything from The Lecturer. The odds of him being responsive are around 50:50 but I give it a go every morning on the way to yoga, just in case.
The Lecturer and I are friends again. Slightly inappropriate, boundary-lacking friends. Every time he does something to make me furious with him, which he has done a lot, I dramatically stop talking to him for a while but then he keeps trying to win me over and invariably says something that really makes me laugh, and I just can’t stay cross with him. ‘You know I don’t speak human’ is his constant excuse – he’s awkward, I’m just so much better at these things than he is, he says. He flatters me until he’s back in my good books every time. However, this time, I hope it might stick. We’ve become much closer over the past few months. Over Christmas, I spent most of my time half-ignoring my family while texting with him continuously. He’s been having a hard time and I have appointed myself chief cheerer-upper. I still find it ridiculously gratifying to amuse him. He is also now officially single.
‘I fear I may bore you with sickening pictures of my idyllic holiday. You might want to mute me for the next little while.’
‘On the contrary, dear Ellie. Please keep me constantly updated with exactly where you are and what you are doing. Send pictures.’
I don’t need to be asked twice. He gets numerous daily updates about every detail of life here, illustrated with artful photos of the yoga shack and me in a bikini.
I’ve got the drill down when I arrive at the yoga shack: total silence, take off shoes and leave belongings in a pile outside, lie down on mat. I’m pretty much always the first one there; the class always starts late. One morning the teacher was still putting mats down when I arrived. When I tried to help him, he shooed me away and acted slightly offended. After that, I just lie down and keep quiet.
He’s not like yoga teachers at home. I never even find out his name. It’s quite relaxing, actually. He’s not a friendly yoga teacher or, thankfully, in any way a creepy yoga teacher. There is no preamble, no chat. No smiling, really.
At my first class, I didn’t realize he was the teacher. He’s a very small man wearing the sort of outfit that seems to be common as a uniform in the hotels and restaurants – a baggy cream-coloured cotton shirt and matching trousers.
The class fills up while I lie there. It’s a mixed class: an Indian family, some older people, a few bendy Western hippies showing off. The teacher has a loud, forceful voice.
‘REEEEELAX,’ he says loudly, in the manner of a military command.
We duly relax, as best we can.
‘BREATHE. CLOSE YOUR EYES. LIE DOWN. FEET FLAT ON FLOOR. I SAID RELAX. RELAX YOUR ENTIRE BODY.’
Every day it’s the same: he starts off chanting a few oms, and everyone joins in. So far, so standard. Then he starts doing some much more complicated chanting that nobody can keep up with, so we all awkwardly tail off mid-om shanti while he chants by himself. He has a beautiful voice. He seems to prefer it when other people don’t join in.
‘OPEN YOUR EYES WITH A SMILE,’ he barks when he’s finished.
Every time, I smile at him ostentatiously to show I’m obeying. He never smiles back. Then it’s straight down to business. It’s much more athletic yoga than I’ve ever done before. We swoop our arms around in windmills and he tells us to GO FASTER. We sit with the soles of our feet together and have to push the insides of our knee joints up and down with our hands as quickly as we can for thirty seconds. When I later tell my yoga-teacher cousin about this, she is appalled. As the days go by, I’m convinced I can push my knees closer to the floor, but she assures me that this would be impossible. Apparently this motion is governed by the depth of our hip sockets rather than dexterity, and really not something that should be forced.
When we do back bends, I am always in awe. He can bend himself so far backwards that he is literally folded in half. It’s really quite a sight to behold. I try and bend at such an angle so that I can watch him throughout.
‘BEND MAXIMUM,’ he shouts from this Exorcist-like position, his head around the back of his ankles. ‘MAXIMUM. ENTIRE BODY.’
When he walks around the room to make adjustments, it generally involves him pressing down on my joints, pushing hard on my back, and contorting me into slightly unnatural poses that I would have said were impossible. It feels quite nice. I like the attention.
When we ‘relax’ at the end of the class, we lie on the ground while he instructs us to RELAX. RELAX YOUR ENTIRE BODY. He recites every body part that we should be RELAXING, loudly. At the end he always says ‘thank you’, not namaste like they always do at yoga classes in London and Brighton. The irony of this always amuses me so much that I genuinely ‘open my eyes with a smile’, as instructed.
I see surprisingly few people come back to this class twice. I hear some hipster girls talking about it on the beach, saying ‘oh no, I’m definitely not going, I’ve heard it’s awful’. This makes me, by default, something of a teacher’s pet, not that the teacher ever acknowledges me. A week or so in, and I’m positioning myself front and centre when I arrive early every day. I have never done this at a yoga class – or any kind of class, or any classroom I’ve ever set foot in – in my life.
Once, an American man asks me outside after the class whether yoga is always supposed to be this hard. I smile knowingly, even though I’m not really sure. I don’t see him at the class again.
I’m not sure whether I have RELAXED MY ENTIRE BODY, but I always come out feeling fantastic. I guess it’s simply because I’m doing an hour of exercise every day at the exact same time I’m usually getting the Brighton to London train to work. At this time of year back home, that’s well before it gets light.
While I’m away I eat curry and rice for every meal and drink beer on the beach on a daily basis, but I have lost weight by the time I go home. For once I am really, really enjoying inhabiting my body.
I tell myself that it’s easy to be this healthy when you have this much time. Still, it’s really not that simple. I love exercising at home, it’s just that sometimes I’m too hungover to enjoy it and it’s more of a chore than it is here. Here, practising moderation – something I struggle with massively at home, like so many of us do, particularly those of us whose role in life is to be the ‘fun’ one – comes naturally. If I go on holiday with my mum or my girlfriends, we start drinking wine at lunchtime and carry on from there. I don’t even notice that we’re being relatively abstemious here until I realize that – having a cocktail at an appropriate pre-dinner cocktail hour, followed by splitting a couple of beers with Ann over dinner – I don’t h
ave a single hangover while we are away. This is definitely the longest I’ve been without a hangover since my teens, especially on holiday.
I’ve also pretty much given up smoking – albeit temporarily – because it’s just not worth my nan’s vocal disapproval. Also, Rose informed me that if she can give up smoking after over fifty years of being on twenty a day, I certainly can – a fact that I can’t really argue with.
Moderation seems to be something that comes more naturally when you get older. Nan and Rose enjoy a drink and don’t go crazy on it, which doesn’t sound like rocket science, but to me kind of is. Nan does exercises every day, and at home, Rose goes to tai chi class every week. They enjoy their bodies as much as they can at this point. Being old is not for the faint-hearted. The combination of fun and self-care is something that for the over-eighties is not just a nice aspiration, but absolutely vital.
The aches and pains of old age are no joke. When I get run-down, I am prone to kidney infections, which invariably leave me bed-ridden and with such severe back pain that I couldn’t get up and go to work if I tried. A while ago, for a few days in a row, Nan said on the phone that she felt under the weather. She continued to drag herself to the shops, to church, to Spanish class, but it was ‘a bit of a struggle’. Nan never likes to admit that anything is a struggle, so this was unusual. Of course it was – when she eventually saw her doctor, she had a kidney infection so severe, they wanted to hospitalise her.
‘Nan! When I have a kidney infection, I can’t even get out of bed. Didn’t you realize something was seriously wrong? Didn’t your back hurt?’
‘Yes, now I think about it. I suppose it did, but not really much worse than usual, with the arthritis. Everything hurts when you get to my age, to be honest, darling. All the time.’
My nan is hard as nails. So is Rose, whose response to the constant arthritic agony in her shoulders is to switch to front-fastening bras. Even Ann, after a lifetime of sport, has had to have a knee replaced. Anyone who makes it to that age is, frankly, heroic. Sometimes I worry I’m not staunch enough to manage old age, if I’m lucky enough to get there. Nan assures me that staunchness increases with age, but I’m certain she was already stauncher than me in her thirties. She was working full-time and bringing up two children by herself. On the other hand, my mobile account is always being suspended because I keep forgetting to pay my bills. I spend hours watching RuPaul’s Drag Race while drinking wine. Nan’s hobby outside of work was to volunteer for the Samaritans.
They say youth is wasted on the young. I don’t have that much youth on my side any more, but I’ve got a lot more than my nan has. Which is why she and Rose are always telling me to make the most of my body, I guess. Having lived in close proximity with them for a while, I get it. They would love to be able to go to yoga class, go running. Also, they would love to get looked at in a bikini. I know that last one because they tell me it constantly.
Present Day
I send a lot of pictures of myself in a bikini to The Lecturer during the course of my time in India. It’s all quite wholesome, but I find myself determined to grab any opportunity for him to view me in a sexy light. The existence and casual sharing of these pictures is testament to a big change that has occurred in the last few years, for better or worse.
Past Me: ‘I can promise you there will never be a naked picture scandal about me. You know why? Because no naked pictures of me will ever exist.’
‘Ellie, that’s probably also because you’re not a celebrity.’
‘Yes, but it’s the principle. Why anybody would ever even take a naked photograph of themselves is beyond me.’
Funny to think I was once so adamant about this sort of thing. It was so easy to say, in that long-ago time when naked picture scandals were first A Thing – what, 2007? I think I still had a BlackBerry, FFS. I had at that point lived with my (very analogue) boyfriend for the past four years. Of course no naked pictures of me existed.
I would then go on to tell the hilarious story about the time K and I stayed at the Hotel Pelirocco circa 2005, and excitingly, had our room upgraded to the basement suite. Which was basically like a subterranean sex dungeon. Complete with mirrors on the ceiling – suspended above the circular bed – which left me so paralysed with early twenties body-dysmorphic horror, we didn’t have sex for the whole of our dirty weekend away.
I turned it into a funny story later on, but actually I spent much of that weekend in the bathroom crying while eating the free retro sweets we’d been given as part of the special sex dungeon package.
My body image at that age was so shaky. My weight fluctuated depending on my mental state – either madly doing exercise videos at 6 a.m. before my unsatisfying temp job and saying I couldn’t have a glass of wine because of the ‘empty calories’, or spending entire weekends eating Pot Noodles and takeaway pizza on the sofa and complaining I felt fat.
Meanwhile, my self-esteem flipped wildly between far too low and far too high. Sometimes I would walk around feeling like hot shit, then I’d be shocked when I saw a picture of myself and realized I didn’t actually look anything like Natalie Portman.
These days I have become more solid in my belief that my face suits me and my happiness levels have no correlation with my size. I have become determined not to give a fuck. If anything these days, I have become neurotic about not being neurotic. However, despite all my best efforts, sometimes it still doesn’t take much to throw me off.
So, no – not for me. There would never be a naked photograph of me in existence. Not in this lifetime, which I thought I had so neatly and cleverly sewn up. So tacky. (And let’s not mention that I was so deep in the midst of a phase of cake baking and sitting down at this point, nobody really wanted to see a naked picture of me. Probably including K.)
Fast forward to late summer 2016: a music festival with my friend Alice, in the rain, watching a singer I love.
‘Her guitarist is hot,’ I said to nobody in particular.
‘Urgh, gross!’ replied Alice. ‘Totally your type.’
And he was. In my dream sex fantasy, all men look like they’re made of pipecleaners and could be in the Faces, ideally with shaggy hair, very tight trousers and possibly some sort of addiction problem.
Long story short: when Hot Guitarist then follows you on Instagram and slides into your DMs on Leonard Cohen’s birthday and you start exchanging witty messages … and then you progress onto WhatsApp and you’re on your way home a bit drunk on gin, just as – due to the time difference – he’s hanging around his apartment in LA and says ‘hey, you wanna send me a picture?’ …
I guess you could sensibly consider the following options:
You are well into your thirties now and things aren’t what they used to be
You’re not particularly adept at taking flattering selfies at the best of times
Potential cringe factor (high)
GDPR?
Or instead you could say: yeah, OK, why not?
Basically, I then spent the next couple of months staying in my house, not speaking to any of my actual friends, and exchanging photographs in various states of undress with a sexy rooster-haired musician on a different continent, who had worked on some of my all-time favourite albums.
It was actually fun. Hot LA Guitarist was appreciative and nice, and had a very photogenic penis. I never met him and I doubt I ever will. I knew he would never see me from an unflattering angle, which felt quite reassuring.
For a time, I had a flatteringly lit mirror permanently set up in one corner of my bedroom. A few times we even had FaceTime ‘dates’. He once read me his favourite Rimbaud poem via FaceTime while we both drank herbal tea in our respective beds. We agreed we were both intellectuals, you see. Intellectuals who liked to exchange really grubby and potentially embarrassing naked pictures.
When I told Alice – who is younger than me and far more experienced in such matters – she was horrified that I had included both my face and my distinctive tattoos in the pict
ures.
‘You’re so naive sometimes, Ells.’
I hadn’t even thought of that. Oh well, he’s a nice guy and, importantly, he’s much more famous than I am so has more to lose. When she then asked me ‘fine, but what if his phone gets nicked and some dodgy stranger gets hold of them?’, I had no answer to that other than ‘fingers crossed, I guess?’.
I suppose eventually the novelty wore off – my photography skills are rudimentary at best, and there are only so many poses a gal can do in her bedroom mirror while trying to avoid including the dirty laundry basket in the background and sucking in her stomach that furiously. However, I kept all of the pictures. Hot LA Guitarist and I aren’t in touch any more. I think of him fondly, as I do all those pictures.
In fact, it was a bit of a revelation. I still take the odd one sometimes, just for myself. If I’m getting out of the bath and putting on my vintage kimono, occasionally I’ll think: yes, you are hot and your tits aren’t what they used to be but they will never be this good again and, yeah, you have cellulite and stretch marks but you also have a pleasingly solid Kardashian arse and the hair of a mermaid princess.
I think this means I actually feel a lot better about myself now than I did in 2007. I’m also (a bit) less judgey. I’m working on it, anyway.