Relax

I dont generally pay much attention to the advice that others give me. I’m often wary of their motives, and besides, if I’m honest, I doubt their abilities to perceive the situation as acutely as I do myself. Like the Chaucerian hero I’m fond of, I cant help feeling I know best where pincheth my own shoe . (These ones, incidently, are agony.) But when six people in a week mention to you, very politely, in passing, that maybe, it might be good to find a way of learning to relax, you cant quite ignore it.

I take a quick straw poll amongst my nearest and dearest to find out their methods of unwinding: Pilates, listening to jazz, smoking, going to the cinema, playing the piano, binge drinking. Go for a facial one friend suggested, but the last time I tried that the skin purifying technique employed was so painful that I leapt off the table and ran away. ‘Come to yoga with me,’ another cajolled, but I havent the patience for that sort of exercise. I’m more your cancan type.

I try to list my own relaxants. I like a hot bath. I like eating large amounts of bland food very quickly. I like chatting. I like playing with a family of dolls that Mary has, called 5-sies. I like nipping into the back of a dark church and sitting quietly for a while. I like watching Mary’s ballet lesson. I love browsing in haberdashery departments in places like Lisbon, when no-one is waiting for me. And then I do like it when I’m ill, not so ill that I cant enjoy the break, but ill enough to merit staying in bed. Sometimes I fantasise about having minor road traffic skirmishes which will win me relatively pain-free hospital spells. Hotel and hospital is an extremely common Freudian slip, with me. I have a feeling this is the reason behind the soaring number of cosmetic surgery procedures that take place every year. It’s not vanity. It’s all about the bed rest.

Making relaxation my goal on Saturday, I started the day with an Aromatherapy Associates Light Relax bath and emerged feeling calm-ish. I was still worried about my new book, whether Mary walking round the house on point all the time is bad for her feet (but oh, her mother’s joy!), my parents’ refusal to understand me, my husband’s bad back, my friend Wendy’s poor feet , and dying, but I felt quite cheery at the same time. Then, in the fashion of a St John’s Wood matron I went and had a blow dry, just because. I followed this with some shopping for babies, which I always enjoy, and bought some little sky blue cable knit baby golfing jackets, made from pashmina, in Portobello Road, for two junior friends of mine who both have a touch of the Cary Grants.

I had been asked to a Five Rhythms dance class some while back, that was about to take place in a community centre nearby, so I decided to give that a try next. Five rhythms, to my understanding, is a form of dance that involves giving your body permission to move in whichever way it wants and needs. ‘ Leave you head at the door, ’ I was told. Now, my body hates moving as much as I do but by the end of the class I was sprinting accross the large hall flinging out my arms and making odd hooting noises, willy nilly. When the class finished 150 minutes later, my head was entirely blank. Empty. Not a thing in it. Outside, under the Westway I floated along. My limbs felt quite separate from my torso in the oddest way. I stopped at a market stall and bought a kilo of litchies for a pound, only somehow I left my change at the stall and also the fruit. I blinked a few times, but nothing came into my thoughts. This is what it must feel like to relax I sensed. Someone bumped into me and someone else blew a whistle loudly near my ear, but I barely felt or heard it. It was as though there was a huge white suede buffer between me and the world. It was awful. I was the living dead. I remembered a friend of mine who suffers from mild depression once saying she’d be absolutely miserable without it.

Gradually I allowed some fledgling thoughts to hatch out. Just go into that cafe right now and order a coffee, the voices told me. Before long the usual avalanche of staved off thoughts came crashing; the regret, the indignation, the upset and the injured pride I raced home, went up to my desk and got out my new novel and a pen straightaway. I breathed a heavy sigh of relief. I love writing. What a luxury to create a whole new set of tensions every day, to rival and double the ones that already exist in the world.