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well-be·ing (noun) - state of being happy, healthy, or prosperous; (synonym) satisfaction, comfort, content, contentment, ease, enjoyment, happiness, pleasure, pride, repletion. [Webster’s Concise Electronic Dictionary, and Collins English Thesaurus]

Prosperous I’m certainly not, but after last night I am in a state of well-being again. It goes like this: I’ve been practising yoga on and off for many years, but in the past year I have been going regularly to a very nice class in a local village hall. I was very happy with it, but then the yoga teacher left to live in Spain (as you do), and couldn’t find anyone to take over the class.

For weeks I looked around for another class at a convenient time, all the time feeling my body stiffening up. Yes, I know I could practice at home on my own, but it’s really not the same, particularly when you have the willpower of the average toddler. Then last weekend I found—right under my nose—a whole health centre called The Yoga Garden. They have all kinds of classes involving different styles of yoga, but I plumped for a form of yoga called ‘Astanga’. It’s a fast, flowing and athletic style—adjectives which never leap to peoples lips in connection with me.

It was wonderful. The idea is to flow between the different postures with your breath, and it’s surprisingly strenuous and intense. The teacher, Sarah, also sang her breathing instructions (“Inhale… Exhale…”), which as she has a lovely pure voice, was rather like getting your instructions from a Tibetan Singing Bowl. After the session I felt light and relaxed, and after the free sauna and a (very brief) dip in the icy plunge pool I felt positively radiant. Thursdays are going to be fun from now on.

When you’re busy and stressed, it’s all too easy to forget about the simple pleasures that don’t need to be slaved over or paid for. Yesterday evening I walked through part of the University Parks, across the water meadows. It wasn’t typical feel-good weather—there was a very soft rain falling, and the skies were charcoal grey—but I did feel good. The evening was a riot of bird song. Something about the soft dampness in the air meant that their songs seemed sweeter and more focussed. All was green and fresh and almost visibly growing before my eyes. The rain wasn’t falling hard enough to get you really wet, but it was soothing and cooling after a day spent in front of a computer screen—like someone you love stroking your face gently with cool, smooth hands. It was so good that I smiled (and probably made myself look like a dangerous lunatic to passers-by, but what the hell).

Of course, these kinds of experiences soon get overlaid by more stress, more frustration, more obsession with work, but just writing about it now is enough to make me smile and relax again.

p. There’s a very busy crossroads not far from my home which is controlled (like most crossroads in the UK) by traffic lights. At peak times, it can take ages (even on a bicycle) to make it across the junction — when the school run bites, glaciers can move faster. You have to wait in the queue for what seems like hours, then about three cars manage to dash across the junction before the lights turn to red. Tonight, pedalling up to the junction, things were very different: traffic moved slowly but smoothly, and before I knew it I was at the junction, and discovered the cause of the unusual speediness: the traffic lights had broken.

p. There was no carnage, chaos (or other words beginning with ‘c’). People crept gingerly out into the flow of traffic, waving politely to other drivers and giving way to the predominant flow, but somehow it all worked rather smoothly. It was rather scary on a low-slung recumbent bike, but I do have a very big and very fluorescent flag on the back, so I trusted that drivers might see it and wonder what it was attached to in time for me not to disappear under a big truck.

p. It was something like my first ride in a rickshaw in India. As we piled headlong into the meleé of cars, bicycles, motorbikes, other rickshaws, pedestrians and cows, with everyone (even the cows) ringing their bells and hooting their horns, I honestly thought we were all going to die. I closed my eyes, and then — much to my surprise — opened them again. Somehow everyone had come out the other side intact, and were even driving the same vehicles that they started off with.

When you start watching gardening programmes (especially the relatively staid Gardener’s World), you know that you’re getting older. I don’t even have a garden (just a rather small balcony), but I hit 30 and found myself starting to take an unhealthy interest in garden centres and not changing channels when the gardening programmes came on. It’s a mystery, but as far as I can tell, it’s an inevitable part of the aging process. Like wanting to wear slippers, and thinking the music’s too loud, the gardening gene gets activated at a certain age and there’s nothing you can do about it.

There’s one consolation for your age-activated gardening genes making themselves felt: Mony Monty Don is now presenting Gardener’s World. I like Mony Monty Don. He’s a straight-forward, intelligent and non-patronizing presenter, and doesn’t mug to camera or have any irritating gimmicks. There’s also the fact that he’s a rather irresistible combination of practical, strong and earthy but sensitive — not to mention quite good-looking.

I remember watching ‘Fork to Fork’, which he presented, and seeing him gently cupping a pear on one of his trees while talking about how lovely and ripe and plump it was. I could picture women of a certain age (and probably a few men) all over the country turning to their partners and saying, “Is it me, or is it a bit hot in here?”

Update. I don’t know what was wrong with my typing brain today. Original spellings left so that I can look an idiot in perpetuity.

p. [29th March 2003 - my birthday!]

p. We’ve been having so much fun on the water, that we decided to have another aquatic adventure. We’re in Crystal River now, up the Gulf coast and on (as the name would suggest) a very clear river estuary.

p. We took out a kayak, and had a wonderful few hours pootling about between islands, up creeks (with our paddles), and around harbours. While we were paddling around in a quiet area, I suddenly saw a couple of dorsal fins. We stopped and kept watching and saw them again. For several minutes, we watched the bottlenosed dolphins (a mother and her offspring, I think), as they came closer to our kayak. At one point, the adult rolled slowly on her side and looked at us curiously. It was totally enchanting, and one of the best birthday presents I can imagine getting. It all ended when some dim-wit in a big boat came roaring through without seeing the dolphins, and they scarpered.

p. [28th March 2003]

p. We loved sailing so much, we couldn’t resist going again. We had beautiful weather, and when I wasn’t in the driving seat (I don’t think I have the correct nautical term there), I curled up on my side on the canvas stretched between the main hull and the outrigger hulls. From this position I have a whole new view on the world. In the middle of my field of view, a very thin band of human habitation divides my view in half, stretched tight from top to bottom. It is padded on the left side by a vertical strip of fluffy white clouds, with blue sky stretching away to the extreme left of my vision. On the right of the land, the green sea streams gently downwards. From this perspective, the landscape seems more democratic — less hierarchical. I wish I had a camera with me.

p. I’ve come back with a cold, a cough that makes bystanders edge away from me for fear that I might have “SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome)”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,4161-631108,00.html and some fantastic memories. My ears also popped on the way back to earth and I now have interesting some interesting new auditory sensations — an underwater sound complete with sonar ping in my left ear and a high pitched whistle in my right. Ah, the joys of air travel. I wouldn’t normally whinge about illness on this page, but I’ve also got raging jet-lag so my willpower is low.

p. Normal service will hopefully resume soon, though I will fly in the face of chronology and post some more entries from Florida before I catch up with myself. It is also likely that none of this will make any sense tomorrow (or today, or whenever I am).

p. By the way, I notice that a couple of little trolls have visited the comments (see “Smarten up your quotes”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000169.html and “Tiny fluffy kittens”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000064.html ) while I’ve been away — what’s the ettiquette: delete them or leave them there for the edification of others?

p. [Sunday 23rd March]

p. Today I had my first ever motor accident. And it happened in a foreign country and in a hire car. Mr. Butshesagirl and I were leaving the conference hotel to visit Okechobee, and a colleague asked if she could follow us in her hire car, as she was a bit nervous about navigating on her own and she was going in the same direction as us. I was just waiting at the exit to the car park — minding my own business — when there was an almighty bang and we got thrown forwards. I couldn’t work out what had happened at first, then I realised that my colleague had run into the back of me. At least we knew each other and were still at the hotel. The duty manager called the Police as our rental companies both said we needed to get a police report. The Police told him to call Highway Patrol. Highway Patrol said it was nothing to do with them as it wasn’t actually on the highway, so we gave up and filled out a hotel incident report instead. Finally — after a few hours — we finally got under way again, a bit shaken up, a little dinged, but otherwise OK.

p. By the way, modern cars are rubbish. In my old Hillman Imp, an impact like that wouldn’t have caused any damage. The impact of the rear car would have just bounced off the sturdy steel bumpers. This piece of junk Chevy got a dented bumper and big flakes of paint peeled off the plastic. They don’t make ‘em like they used to.

p. [Tuesday 18th March]

p. With my usual perfect timing, I end up travelling the day before war breaks out. Typical. My Dad’s advice — “Don’t mention the war!” (in Basil Fawlty voice). I’ll have to try to remember that, or I might find myself in an orange jumpsuit in Guantanamo Bay. It feels rather odd to be away from home with everything that’s going on — I’m missing the BBC coverage a lot, imperfect though it is.

p. I’ve never really watched CNN before (not having cable or satellite), but I don’t really care for it. The war coverage in particular strikes me as being somewhat voyeuristic and doesn’t really ask any difficult questions. Their little statistics graphics for the ‘planes, tanks and weapons really remind me of “Top Trumps” — if anyone remembers that card game. I saw an interview with three American soldiers, where the interviewer asked them if they wanted to say hello to anyone back home. The first two said hi to the usual friends, family and girlfriends, but the last one thanked Oakley, for “making the best sunglasses in the world”. Oops. The CNN reporters crawled all over themselves to point out that it wasn’t a product placement.

p. [Tuesday 25th March]

p. I’m going to have to move to somewhere on the coast or near a large body of water, as I’ve just got hooked on sailing. After a lot of deliberation (Mr. Butshesagirl and I are useless decision-making: “What do you want to do?” “I don’t know — what do you want to do?”) we plumped for sailing. We hired a trimaran for 2 hours at Dunedin (not the one in Scotland, obviously).

p. Now, we have never sailed in our lives, so we had a brief lesson and then we were off into the wide blue yonder. It was fantastic — just the sound of the water on the hull, the wind in the sail, and me yelling “Watch out for that jet-ski!”. We saw an osprey with a fish in its talons, gannets diving and pelicans mooching about. And sailing itself is so satisfying: when you get it just right you wait till the wind picks up the sail, then you pull it in a bit and off you go. We’re not going to be doing a round the world yacht race any time soon, but we were going vaguely in the direction we wanted to go in at about the right time, and having a lot of fun, so I think we were more or less doing it right.

p. So now we just need to save up about $4,000 for the trimaran and move to somewhere warm so that we don’t get hypothermia pursuing our new hobby.

p. It’s amazing what you can find in small provincial market towns. We went up to visit friends who live in Leek this weekend: it’s a small town in Staffordshire, 25 miles or so from Stoke-on-Trent. In the evening, we went out to a (of all things) a Belgian beer house and restaurant called ‘Den Engels’. They have somewhere in the region of 77 different types of genuine Belgian brews*, and some rather quirky ordering policies. If you have a Kwak (great name, eh?), you have to leave one of your shoes in a basket which gets winched down from the ceiling and then up again. This is to prevent wandering feet from walking out with the complicated glassware that the Kwak gets served in. The glass looks like something from your school chemistry lessons, supported by a nice bit of woodwork. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, Belgian beers are famously strong — up to 12%. The next morning you do feel somewhat as if you’ve taken part in a chemistry experiment, so the glass flask thing is actually rather appropriate.

p. We were celebrating our friend’s birthday, and had some helium balloons at the table while we were eating. Ah, the comic possibilities that arise when you combine strong Belgian beer, friends and helium. When the birthday boy started telling us all about his favourite noble gas after he’d inhaled nearly a whole balloon, we were pretty much helpless with laughter.

*I only know this because I counted them afterwards on the beer list — I had totally lost count after only a couple.

p. This afternoon I walked home along the cycle path that cuts through the University Parks and over the meadows bordering the River Cherwell. In winter, the meadows are almost permanently flooded: today, the water was pooling around the roots of the rushes which were bent over and broken — seemingly oppressed and battered by the weight of winter and the coming darkness. I know how they feel.

p. In the little pools, ducks dabbled. As I walked by, shiny green heads appeared above the vegetation, watching me suspiciously. Dusk was just falling, and flocks of starlings formed skeins of grey and black against the pink of the sunset, heading for their roosts. They are all activity at the moment, so spring must be on its way — not a moment too soon.

p. My “masseter (In case you don’t know where it is)”:http://home.teleport.com/~bobh/masseter.htm muscle is still aching from Sunday night. You see, we went to see Rich Hall (in his “Otis Lee Crenshaw”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/cambridgeshire/stage/2003/02/rich_hall.shtml persona) at the Playhouse in Oxford, and I laughed so much I pulled something. He came on to the stage, guitar in hand and started strumming. This went on for some time, and everybody was wondering what this gentle sounding song was going to turn into. Eventually, the lyrics came in: “Let’s all get together / And kill George Bush”. He had us in the palm of his hand from that moment on. His country song parodies all have fantastic and unexpected twists to them. “Drunk” starts sounding like a sweet song, reminiscing about the good times — “Do you remember nights beneath the Milky Way? / Held you in my arms, Darlin’ how we’d sway”. But at the end of the verse we get a total turn around — “Do you remember? / Well I don’t / Cause I was drunk!”

p. Rich/Otis is also fantastic at improvisation, and invented a couple of songs about audience members during the evening. The most memorable one was an epic ballad about a stock broker called Alan heroically intervening to prevent a truck full of stocks and shares hitting a school bus and sending the stock market out of control when the children fail to learn about the value of money. He’s a very funny man, but how he doesn’t wreck his voice doing Otis’ phlegmy rattle is quite beyond me.

I went for a walk with my camera in the University Botanic Gardens this morning (more pictures in Wings Open Wide tomorrow). I haven’t been there since I finished The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman, and I wanted to look at the bench featured in the book. Here Lyra and Will each agree to sit once a year – in their own worlds – and think about one another. I took this picture of what I thought was the most likely candidate, and then something strange happened. A fox appeared from a bush near the benches, shot underneath it and paused, looking out at me before it dashed off through the fence and into Christchurch meadows. The garden was full of people, but no-one else seemed to notice the fox. I was struck by the absurdly romantic idea that it might be someone’s daemon – perhaps mine.

And I thought I was a geek… This guy has hacked ‘floatbg’, a background changer for X, so that the colour gives some cues to the time of day. This was because he was spending so much time in his windowless loft that his circadian clock got completely randomised. He puts it much better than I could:

”It was easier than hacking my medulla oblongata. I hate hardware.”

You know, sometimes I look at the weather on my menubar and think, “It’s snowing? [actually looks out window] Oh. So it is.” But hey, I know what time it is. I have a clock on my menubar too.

[via BoingBoing]