The Daily Novel

Just read a story on The Guardian website, by Joan Bakewell, who used to be known as the thinking man’s crumpet to people of my generation. She is, if my memory is still in working order, almost exactly the same age as me. I remember her fondly, not so much for her looks, but for the religious programme she did, which made a serious attempt to look at a variety of religions from a number of different angles. Her programmes were very thoughtful and had much of interest to believers and sceptics.

So I clicked on her story, entitled ‘Fit for my age’, with expectations that it would convey a thougtful message useful to me. As I read it I got quite a different reaction. The ‘thinking’ in it, was of a kind working class yobos like me used to call ‘half-baked’ but her judgment, based on her evident ability to learn from her actual experiences, rather than be dominated by all those intellectuals who conveyed their thoughts to her, means that she has learnt to base her actions, on on results she has experienced not on theories she was told about, mostly by men.

The Guardian sub-editor, in the strap, asserts that we all need more exercise, not less, as we get older, but that Joan Bakewell has found that as we get older you also have to pace yourself and recognise your own limitations.

Bakewell’s story tells of two forms of ‘exercise’ which she took up in later life. When she was in her late 50s, she realised that although she was much fitter than most, she was developing ‘old woman’s stoop’. Not good box office for a television presenter. So she tried the Alexander technique, which many of my younger readers may not have heard of. She writes of it very positively. She reports it is not just exercises but rather:

It’s more like a way of learning how your body works and educating it to minimise the tensions that a lifetime’s bad habits have built up.

What she learnt from Alexander felt restful and right. She notices the difference when she fails to do the exercises, she feels ‘lumpy and wrong’.

But it was not enough for Bakewell, and when she was visiting one of those health farms she got hooked on the currently fashionable Pilates exercises. She describes in detail some of the benefits they brought her, but in her final paragraph she expresses, very politely, some scepticism about the Pilates doctrine urging people to push their bodies to the limits.

So what she actually does now, is avoid the treadmill of pushing herself to the limits, but combining her bits of Alexander and her bits of Pilates, with walking in the country, the gentle pleasures of which she has discovered late in life.

I don’t know anything about Pilates, apart from what I have heard at parties, but I am quite sure that F. E. Alexander, would have applauded what she is doing now, joined her in her country walks and told her many interesting things. And probably he would have cautioned her that not all of the Pilates approach is compatible with Alexander.
Alexander was an Australian, who liked to figure out things for himself. He wanted to become an actor, but he had a dreadful stutter, which none of the medics could cure. So he devised the Alexander technique to cure his own stutter, which it did. He figured out that it was all to do with breathing, and that there was a human tendency to hold the breath, when under the tension of performing. His exercises are still used in many drama and singing schools today.

But in the 1930s the Alexander technique became very fashionable in the late thirties London for many purposes. Stafford Cripps was one of it’s followers, and it no doubt helped him, in feeling easier in his body and mind, while he was, as Labour’s post-war Chancellor of the Exchequer, continuing to ration the pleasures of the multitude (like sweets for the boy who now writes The Daily Novel). We all suffered so that the our factories could be rebuilt and our exports increased.

Now, if I was walking side by side with Bakewell on the Cotswold Way (which I can still manage) I would be telling her about the Bob Jones notions. Not exactly wisdom, but based on actual experience and things I have read in rather good books, including some by scientists.

I might tell her that it is not only physical exercise that ‘get’s oxygen into the body, keeps the circulation going’ and ‘exercises the heart muscles’. It is also analytical thinking and experiencing emotions. The brain is also part of the body and it works in a mysterious way. The latest research shows that it does not work in the way most scientists thought it worked, even as recently as twenty years ago.

So the message, dear Joan, is that you are getting quite a lot of exercise while writing your articles for The Guardian, which I hope you will keep up. Because you have earned a Daily Novel gong by disclosing your own personal experience and telling the readers how it has affected the opinions which you express.

Carry on writing, enjoy the walking, but go easy on the hills.