Excess Baggage

(Archive - Tuesday 19^th October 2010)

Consider this morning a typical one, just like any other.  I wake at 7.15am, fresh from eight solid hours of unbroken dreamless sleep after a very pleasant evening of teetotal merriment with a couple of friends.  It would be an exaggeration to say that as I leap out of bed there is a song on my lips and joy in my heart but there may be a gentle rhythm stirring somewhere and there’s definitely a certain inner perkiness.  I tip down a pint of lukewarm water with half a lemon squeezed into it while juicing together several carrots, apples and a hunk of ginger and sprinkling banana slices and fresh frozen blueberries over a bowl of home mixed muesli, which I fill with rice milk and chase down with a variety of vitamins and supplements designed to do all sorts of wonderful things to my brain, heart and assorted innards.  I leap energetically on my bike and pedal several miles up the road where I spend two hours twisting myself into odd positions in a room heated to over 100 degrees (that’s Fahrenheit before you start pricing wreaths and wondering who gets the Wodehouse collection).  I am now back at my desk enjoying a cup of nettle tea and the combined natural sugar rushes of three different pure fruit juices.

Does any of this sound odd to you?  Aside from the fact that anyone who has known me more than five minutes will find the whole thing utterly bizarre and inexplicable, there are actually two points of peculiarity here.  The first is that, while you might consider such healthy living behaviour to be typically (even stereotypically) Californian, I am no longer in California.  The second is that I didn’t behave anything like this while I was in California either.

Checking in for my flight home at San Francisco Airport, I am told that I am overweight.  I am surprised.  Americans can often be quite personal in their comments but the ones I’ve met are usually more encouraging than this.  I realise that he means my baggage.  It is my suitcase that is straining round the middle and tipping the scales at twenty pounds more than luggage its height and age usually should.  To avoid an excess baggage fee, I am made to open the case and decant half of its contents into a cardboard box, to be checked in as a second piece of luggage.  This is done in the middle of the check-in hall, surrounded by queues of travellers on all sides.  It is the very last time I pack all my dirty shreddies anywhere near the top of my suitcase.

I am surprised at this increase in baggage weight.  Sure I have stuffed my case with all the Kelsey Port that HM Customs will allow me to carry but I hadn’t realised that it would weigh that much.  Perhaps it’s the Denver Broncos pyjamas for my brother-in-law.   I am taking away more from California than I expected. Probably thanks to too many nights enjoying the lavish hospitality of the Central Coast’s wineries and hostelries, I seem also to have brought home the desire to detox and to be healthy.

I’m sure it’s just a phase I’m going through and I’ll soon grow out of it but, for the moment, and probably the next few days even, I am emanating the healthy Californian stereotype: eating well; pushing aside the pints and puddings; declining the dairy; hanging out in health food shops and having meaningful conversations with the staff about supplements; juicing things that should normally be roasted and serving up things that should normally be left out for squirrels; drinking more water than a desert full of dromedaries and refusing to make a decision without considering the ramifications for my omega 3 levels.  I am going everywhere on my bike and, of course, there is the yoga.  You can’t get more Californian than yoga.

It is Marianne’s sister Gabriella who talks me into Bikram Yoga.  She arrives from Mexico two weeks into my stay in San Luis Obispo and immediately begins to join Gary on his regular visit to SLO’s steamiest studio.  The two of them come back every evening, flushed and utterly sweat sodden, with deep satisfied smiles on their faces and tell me how Bikram Yoga is brilliant, how I should do Bikram Yoga, how Bikram Yoga would be so good for me, how Bikram Yoga will change my life, until I am nearly sick of them and profoundly sick of Bikram bloody Yoga.  Despite this, something somehow gets through and I begin to feel slightly tempted…

However, it is also Gabriella who thoroughly puts me off ever ever ever doing Bikram Yoga in SLO, by reinforcing all the reasons my imagination offers me as arguments against doing it.  I’ve had a couple of lamentable forays into the world of contortion-as-exercise before.  A friend called Brian invited me to join a Men’s Beginner Yoga class he set up a few years ago, in which a bunch of us guys wobbled and tottered and pulled muscles in front of Brian’s friend, a newly qualified dainty blonde yoga instructor, before going off to the pub and discussing how much we fancied Brian’s friend and undoing any possible good we’d done.  A few years later I tried again at the Pilates class in my gym where I discovered to my horror that, despite being the youngest there by some twenty years, I was no more flexible than Abu Hamza on the subject of topless sunbathing.  How would this inability be received in San Luis Obispo?

The answer, I suspect, is not well.  In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king but he’d feel a bit of an idiot showing up somewhere full of 20/10-visioned supermen with X-ray eye sight and a couple of spare eyeballs in the backs of their heads.  This peculiar metaphor sums up how I feel about my fitness when compared to the people around me. 

Consider the maths.  San Luis Obispo has a population of 37,000.  This is split between 17,000 students and 20,000 normal people.  Obviously, at thirty six, I’m older than all the students.  If our allotted span can be considered to average out at three score years and ten then I’m halfway through that, making me older than 50% of the normal people.  But Californians are not normal.  Most of them are considerably younger and fitter than their years.  That should probably skew a few more of them, say 10%, to functioning as younger than an English thirty-six year-old.  If you then say that I’m not even the fittest of Englishmen, that probably shunts me up another 10% in the reckoning.  So this extra 20% means that I’m effectively older than 70% of the 20,000 regular Californians as well as all 17,000 students. Reach for your calculator and you’ll see that this makes me functionally older or considerably unfitter than 84% of the people in SLO and if you’re in the oldest most unfit 16% of a city, you’re hardly likely to be going to Bikram Yoga, are you?

In my mind, any Bikram Yoga class in San Luis Obispo would be filled with people much younger and/or fitter than me.  They would have spent their lives in pursuit of the Californian ideal (not quite the same as being in pursuit of the ideal Californian).  I’m not sure what their combined reaction will be to someone so obviously antithetic to everything they hold dear but I’m pretty certain I don’t want to find out.  My only hope is for this somehow not to be true, for the class to be full of people good-naturedly falling sideways on one leg or having to tuck their tummies in before they lean forward.  But Gabs’ enthusiastic Latino gushing about her fellow Bikram classmates squashes that hope flatter than some of the stomachs she is describing in such gleeful detail. 

‘O’seya, that guy was pretty dam hot today, the one with the tattoo on his bell-ly.  Such maah-sulls.  And his friend is so HANDsome.  Mmm, I have never seen abs like this.  So good-loo-king.’  From the impression she gives, most of the men do yoga in nothing but scary Speedos and a sheen of sweat over their toned tans while the women (‘So séx-see.  Ay yay yay.  So yaang’) are all eighteen and blonde and spend the whole time checking out the men.

I decide that Bikram Yoga in SLO is not for me.  I cannot hold my own among a group of hyper-fit Californian Peter Pans, sweating good health and meat-,

wheat-, gluten- and dairy- free diets from every pore and radiating disapproval of me - disapproval of my balance and my tummy and my inflexibility and my hideous old age - from their outstretched fingertips, down in a perfect line through their mahogany brows and their concrete concave stomachs to a single precisely pointed big toe on which they are perfectly balanced.  I cannot do it.  I need to be in a place which celebrates the underdog; which makes a fond joke of difficulty; where you can topple over onto the person next to you and make it all okay with a wry and awkward grin…

So I take up Bikram Yoga in London, trying out a place off Chiswick High Road and it’s perfect.  There are people who are very good at yoga and there are people who are very toned, some even tanned.  A few of them manage all three but very few look at me while they are doing it.  I am free to get on with it, slowly learning the poses and sweating into my T-shirt and towel, chickening out of a second Eagle pose or slurping water during the Camel pose.  I’ve discovered that I am particularly talented at a pose called ‘Savasana’ but before you are too impressed I must admit that it is also known as ‘the dead body pose’ and doesn’t involve much more than lying on the floor with your hands out. 

Of course plenty of people do it bare-chested; men that is.  But somehow there isn’t the same sort of posturing attitude that I’d imagined.  It’s not the way of things.  Not usually.  There was one distasteful transgressor who turned up, toned and mahogany tanned, and performed a range of poses on the mat right in front of mine, wearing a pair of what my friend Carl would describe as ‘budgie smugglers’; what’s more, budgie smugglers that he’d obviously borrowed from a younger brother as they were stretched tighter than torture and had small twinkly stars at the waistband.  A few of us more right-minded thinkers gave him such a dirty glare as he sat in the changing room afterwards, still sporting the horrifying briefs and ostentatiously drinking tea, that I haven’t seen him since. 

‘Good riddance,’ I said to a rotund and bespectacled man in his early nineties, ‘his sort don’t belong here.’