Exercise Freedom

          Our local, council-owned gym/sports centre is about to close for a six-month-long refit. We can go meanwhile to another of their establishments, but it is inconveniently located and would involve a relatively long journey. But anything more than a ten-minute walk is a real disincentive for someone like me, whose enthusiasm for work-outs is marginal at best, so I have stopped my subscription. Until it reopens I intend to get my exercise quota, free of charge, by more cycling and walking. My Other Half, however, has a much more demanding keep-fit regime and cannot contemplate a gym-free environment. She has signed up with a commercial outfit nearby, one that has upmarket pretensions manifest in its location, slick facilities, fancy lounge-cum-coffee bar and a price tag that is not for the faint-hearted. (In fact, she has appropriated my former subscription to subsidise her new one. The arrangement is by mutual consent.)

          I am similarly apathetic about swimming. Although we live just a few steps from the sea and a few hundred metres from an open-air, free-to-use, seawater pool, the stars have to be in a certain alignment before I’m inclined to reach for my trunks. Meanwhile, my OH will have completed her daily triathlon: running, working-out and twenty lengths in the fast lane. I marvel that she has the time and energy for much else, yet she recruited me recently to help out at a couple of environmental ‘actions’ she is involved with.

          Sometimes a confluence of events brings about critical mass and lends extra momentum to the progress of a cause. In this case, I cite the water companies’ cynical approach to dumping untreated sewage into the sea and rivers. They’ve been doing it for years, sneaking it in without too many people noticing, but the public has finally caught on and its outrage is rising. So, what changed? Could it be the increasing popularity of wild swimming that has brought so many people face-to-face, literally, with the facts? They are beginning to join ranks with organisations like Surfers Against Sewage, another group of citizen-witnesses to the daily discharges of waste. Environmental activists are showing up on beaches around the country this summer, asking people to sign a petition proposing that the government adopt its plans for cleaning up and regulating the pollution of our waterways. My part in this campaign is supportive. I am deemed too much of a risk to be entrusted with public outreach – the task of approaching people and asking them to sign a petition or take a leaflet. It requires certain skills that are characterised by friendliness and engagement – both of which I can do, up to a point. But I can’t be relied upon to sustain them in the face of obduracy, uninterestedness or worse, hostility. At risk of showing myself up as the Basil Fawlty of public relations, I am best employed fetching and carrying, putting up the banners, fixing broken displays and remaining in the background. (Though, come to think of it, how controversial is the issue of swimming with turds?)

          Judging by the number of signatures obtained by the reachers-out this is going to be a big, fat petition, despite the unseasonal weather that has kept so many people away from the beaches. A few sunny weekends should transform it into a jumbo document, capable of impressing upon politicians that the greed of water companies has become a significantly vote-sensitive issue at last.

          Of course, while I’m helping out at these events, three things are going through my mind: before you know it, winter will be here and my enthusiasm for cycling and walking will be damped by the weather; if I wasn’t keen on swimming in the sea in the first place, I’m even less so now, knowing what I know; and maybe it’s a capitalist conspiracy to corner us all into paying for gym membership?

 

 

  

 

Heavy Weather

          I once heard a mountain climber from America say how baffled he was by the number of Brits he encountered on the major continental ranges. Since the peaks of Britain are relatively short of stature, he had not expected them to provide adequate training for the development of such expertise. But then he got it: variable weather is the key. British climbers’ skills are enhanced by the layer of resilience required to deal with frequent and abrupt changes in the weather in, say, the Cairngorms or Snowdonia. Another American, Bill Bryson, observed this trait, albeit at a lower altitude, when he commented that only the British could imagine they were having fun crouched behind a sheltering rock with a cheese sandwich and a thermos of tea.

          None of this is proof that we are a universally hardy island race, of course. One has only to note the steady exodus to reliably sunny holiday destinations and the resulting decline of our once popular domestic seaside resorts to realise that, though we may be accustomed to the weather, we don’t really like its changeability. And even those few of us who do, sometimes get sick of its being a conversational mainstay. That said, July, although it did not provide us with overt summery joy, did compensate with much-needed rain, which plumped up the wild blackberries and will ensure an abundant (and early) crop of juicy apples. (So, in anticipation of nature’s bounty, we have acquired a small, pre-owned chest-freezer to accommodate the large quantities of stewed fruit we are already starting to accumulate.)

          Early August has brought some sunnier spells and a stream of friends and family to our manor, attracted, I’m sure, by the unique combination of the delights of the SW English Riviera and our own, universally acknowledged, good company. Among our visitors were a couple of friends and their nine-year-old twin daughters, who came in a campervan the same size as ours and with whom we spent a couple of days near the Cornish fishing port-cum-holiday town of Looe. We camped on a clifftop with a lovely view of the bay, a steep walk to the beach and a high degree of vulnerability to the prevailing winds, all of which we enjoyed in varying degrees. Not that we heard even one word of complaint, but our friends’ campervanning experience has mostly been in the south of France, as was evident in the fact that their set-up is what I would call continental – an awning for shade, facilities for cooking and dining al fresco etc. Their van is for travelling and sleeping in, whereas ours is capable of sustaining us comfortably for twenty four hours without setting foot outside. As it happens, the days were sunny enough for outdoor activities, but our communal suppers had some elemental challenges. On the first night there was no rain, but the windbreak we had stashed in our locker had to be erected around the picnic table to prevent food being blown off plates and our friends had to retract their awning before it flapped itself to shreds. On the second night, there was barely a breeze, but the rain started at mealtime and the awning was usefully deployed as a parapluie rather than a parasol. Later, with the children abed, we adults squeezed into our van for a nightcap.

          Britain’s weather may, arguably, play a part in the formation of national character. As a topic of conversation, it has always been a useful opener, though not one to drawl on about for too long. But perhaps this is about to change. Now that weather is consistently headline news all over the world, not just because of its variability and extreme, violent unpredictability, but also because of our failure to address, insofar as we are able, the causes of this change, now is certainly the time to have serious conversations about it.

 

Back and Forth Across the Atlantic

          You know how when a friend sends you a link to an article that they think might be of interest to you, the moment you open it the publishers seize the opportunity to persuade you to become a subscriber? That happened to me recently with the New York Times (NYT). Now, arguably, I don’t have the headspace for yet another online publication, but they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse (£20 for the year!), which got me thinking that I’m too comfortable anyway with my daily fare and might benefit from a change of journalistic perspective. However, though it may be too early to call, I’m beginning to think that there is not that much of a cultural gulf – let alone an ocean – between the American and British beneficiaries of my subscriptions.
          The NYT logo is in the same old-fashioned typeface as that of our own Daily Telegraph, conveying the superficial impression (to the uninitiated) that both papers adhere to conservative views. But, in the case of the NYT, the typeface is more likely intended to signal long-established journalistic bona fides than stuck-in-the-mud opinions. Indeed, the paper does contain some quaintly Old World usages of our language. For example, in an obituary for the recently deceased Randy Meisner, founding member of The Eagles, the author subsequently refers to him as “Mr. Meisner” and his associates as Messrs Frey and Henley, titles which, surely, the old rockers only ever saw printed in legal documents.
          Apart from reading the NYT, I am also consuming other forms of American culture and becoming obsessed by unravelling its origins in European traditions. The novelist Barbara Kingsolver, having sat at Charles Dickens’ desk, was inspired to write Demon Copperhead – a reimagining of David Copperfield. It is evident that she picked up on the element of social commentary in Dickens’ work and made it a linchpin of her own. The film, Oppenheimer, is an American story, set in New Mexico, yet the science itself and the scientists involved in the project originated in Europe. Moreover, the objective was to bring an end to a war started in Europe. On TV, I’ve just watched a series called The Bear, which is set in Chicago and written in vibrant, coarse, everyday dialogue that is unmistakeably vernacular. Yet the characters constantly reference their Italian heritage and the main protagonist is a chef, trained in Europe and intent on recreating the same tradition of fine dining back in downtown Chicago. Back at the cinema for Barbie, the European connection is less obvious, though I have read that the American creator of the adult doll was inspired by an earlier model that that she had seen on a visit to Germany. The German doll went by the name of Bild Lilli and, in my opinion, looked a little bit sexy, which is not something I could say about her American descendant, surely a victim of the superficial sanitisation of sexuality for which America acquired a reputation in the post-war years. But in the film version, Barbie acquires an understanding of the politics of patriarchy. The next time I come across her I’ll be seeing more than just a plastic doll.
          But perhaps the most unexpected example of this cultural cross-fertilisation is the NYT’s coverage of cricket, that most un-American of games. Yes, there are reports of the test matches in England but, more surprising – to me at least – is the news that cricket is becoming big in America (as it was before the civil war.) This rebirth is being driven by immigrants from Australia, South Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia, all of whom got it from the English. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised to see it re-packaged and sent back across the Atlantic to us sometime soon.