Lateness, Lepers and the Inadvisable Squat

I missed the first six minutes of the school assembly, in which my ten year-old daughter was playing a leper. Sod’s law that her only speaking part was right at the beginning - what are the chances? - and that she wasn’t required to stay in character for the rest of the assembly. I missed her performance in its entirety. She was livid. When I creaked the church door open to sneak inside, optimistically believing that I might be able to take a pew undetected and that my tardiness would go unnoticed, she was right there, metres from the entrance, glaring at me through her bandages.

The worst thing was that all the pews in the church were already filled and it was standing room only. Not much in the way of standing room either, unless I wanted to block someone else’s view, which is a big no-no at a school assembly. Spectating parents establish their clear line of vision and you must not cross it - there are rules at these things, especially when it comes to significant festivals and dramatic productions. And woe betide anyone who gets in the sightline of the Reception Parents, who are enjoying the various renditions for the very first time.

Anyway, I danced apologetically from one aisle to the next, searching for a spare corner to tuck myself into, bobbing around with an inane grin on my face looking like the medieval jester who’d never been right since the King’s horse kicked him in the head. It became embarrassing - what do you do when there’s no room at the inn? Leave? Lie down on the flagstone floor?

In the end I made one of my characteristically ruinous life decisions and squatted down on my haunches at the end of a side aisle (or nave-aisle, if you remember random facts from your religious studies classes), with the majority of the parents to my rear and all 100 of the school’s pupils in front. I may as well have positioned a spotlight over my head, or climbed atop a podium. It was a bold move and I hadn’t given it due consideration before ploughing on in and committing myself. The thinking was that I would show maximum interest in my son’s contribution to the assembly - a line of a poem, read out loud - to atone for being late and missing the leper sequence. (Which was actually because I had been doing a very good deed, see how the innocent are punished!) I had reasoned that if I edged boldly to the front, past the parent/student frontier line, I would look extra-maternal and extra-invested in both my children’s lives and they would see first-hand how interested I was in their performances.

Well. When was the last time you squatted? The type of squat you do when you’re a kid with elastic limbs and bouncy joints? We’re talking all of the bodyweight, taken solely in the knee joints, with glutes touching balls of feet. Virtually contortion. The excruciating pain set in at approximately the half minute mark, where I felt as though my knees might just crumble in on themselves; at two minutes I was convinced that my burning joints were about to spontaneously combust. It was a high, wincing pain, impossible to ignore - the thigh burn and lower back ache and foot cramps were minor by comparison. At four minutes I began to actively sweat from the intense physical torment I was enduring, at five I began to see strange dancing lights in front of my eyes.

And I couldn’t get up because my nine year-old was watching me like a hawk, making sure I was ready and in place to hear his line of poetry. I couldn’t break eye contact, let alone move position. And then, after he’d done his speaking part, I couldn’t move position because I was completely stuck. Muscles trapped in violent spasm. Joints seized. Toes completely devoid of sensation.

I don’t know whether you’ve ever listened to thirty smallish children reciting a poem of their own creation, passing the screeching microphone from one clammy hand to the next, all saying their words in the same strange voice that is at once monotone but erratic: it can trigger quite an intense feeling of claustrophobia, that you have been cornered and are never to be released. I can tell you that it is massively more intense when you have sunk yourself into an inadvisable squat position and cannot move until the recital is over.

All this to say: I am going to make an effort with my muscle-toning-and-building exercises this year. Although I spin on my Peloton bike every other day (almost without fail, seven miles at high intensity) I don’t feel that I have much in the way of overall muscle tone. It’s patchy. My knees give way if I go upstairs a certain way, my wrists can barely support my own weight if I try to get up from the floor. Sometimes I feel like a bit of a sack of spare parts, everything jangling about inside.

I have an advance copy of a brilliant book on my bedside table - Elizabeth Davies’ Training for your Old Lady Body, which is a much-needed take on exercise that ignores all of the viral social media bollocks and concentrates on helping you to build a strong body that’ll serve you well as you age. So important. I feel as though it’s the book we will all thank ourselves for reading in twenty years’ time. You can pre-order it here. Elizabeth also has online weight-lifting courses that I’ve been promising to start for almost a year: tomorrow is the day. I shall let you know how I get on - there’s nothing like committing an intention to paper in front of lots of people!

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Photo by VD Photography on Unsplash