Life’s a mess

On holiday for a week until Monday and now off sick until next Monday. How I managed to contract flu while lying under deep blue skies in 80 degree sunshine for a week is beyond me, but I did. So, today is my third day off work, and the first day, since we got back from Gran Canaria, that I have been upright for more than five minutes.

Gran Canaria was deliciously hot all week. Here it went down to minus 7 – apparently. We stayed in Puerto Rico. I’m not sure I’d go back – not true: for an absolutely no-frills holiday at vv low cost it would be fine. It is a soul-less place though. All resort. It suited however – all I wanted was a week of sleeping in the sun.

I read a lot – David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, which was disappointing. After Cloud Atlas it was much too predictable. As antidote I then read John Irving, Hotel New Hampshire, which is plain wonderful. The phrase ‘sorrow floats’ will live with me for ever – and summons up something of the complex reaction I had to the book of mirth and sadness. I read The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru, which I’d picked up in a charity shop a couple of days before we left, began with slight reservations as it promised to be overambitious, and which I couldn’t put down. I read Brokeback Mountain one morning, and Sansom’s Revelation which was a predictably ripping good read. Himself was reading at a similar rate and all his ‘have reads’ ended up on my ‘to be read’ pile, so I’ve some home with as much to read as when I left.
We discovered almond and lemon biscuits, and nibbled them for breakfast most days. In the evenings we went to the mall to eat. The mall is a frightful place – shop after shop sporting racks and racks of tacky souvenirs, gaudy flipflops, swimwear; ‘international restaurants’ galore with touts galore – although there was one tout whom I warmed to, as he resembled Leonard Rossiter, with the manner of Sergeant Wilson. We found one bar with a menu in Spanish, and good local food, but for the rest of the time made do with well prepared but unexciting ‘international food’. The paella on the last night was beautifully served (and delicious), but the restaurant as cheek by jowl with an arcade so the meal was punctuated by children’s squeals, electronic whoops, and because, a man had a couple of parrots on display there, squawks.

I’ve started going to the gym. Not a considered decision, I admit. Had I considered it, I’d have seen sense and foregone the experience. But I didn’t, so I haven’t, and now, three times a week, pedal like blazes up hill and down dale, for half an hour, while others around me are pounding away on treadmills or rowing like lunatics - all of us in front of panels as complex as those of an aircraft, which tell us how far we’ve travelled, how near to a heart attack we are, and how many calories we have used (depressingly few, I find (I have yet to burn off a Mars bar’s worth, for example)).

During the first few visits, my heart rate hovered perilously close to cardiac arrest, not as a consequence of exercise, but as a result of mortification – one is not merely surrounded by frighteningly fit, young students: one is surrounded by frighteningly fit, young students one is going to teach just as soon as one has showered, changed, and recovered sufficiently for one’s face to revert from puce to one’s more usual shade – a shade that shows that this woman with red hair also has freckles.

I have just about got over this stage in my development, not least because I am now confident enough to play with the myriad buttons on the dashboard, and so, because I am not exactly au fait with aforementioned buttons, am either hanging on to the handlebars for dear life having pushed the button for the cycling-down-the-north-face-of-the-Eiger-on-a-fixed-wheel-bike programme; or wheezing over the handlebars, having pushed the button for the cycling-up-the-north-face-of-the-Eiger-in-top-gear programme. In life-threatening circumstances such as these, it would be foolish to squander what little spare energy one has on fripperies such as self-consciousness.

Besides, there are ample opportunities for embarrassment once one has dismounted. (NB: ‘dismount’ is being used somewhat loosely here, taking it to apply when one intentionally parts company with one’s bike, but with no implications whatsoever about the method of parting.) For one has to cross the floor from bike to door. And one has then to descend a long flight of stairs to the changing room; stand in the shower; and, once respectable, walk back to one’s department. All this without losing balance or face.