Fitter than THIS, anyway.

I remember many years ago telling a chronically ill student that she needed to be fitter to sing well … it was both a) true and b) genuinely well-intentioned but it didn’t really fit the third criterion for helpful criticism: c) we should only recommend POSSIBLE courses of action. No point telling a 30 year old that their showjumping would work better if they were shorter. I don’t think I really understood about chronic illness then. I’m lucky she didn’t decide I was a complete fool and hate me from then on! Well - we are still friends on Facebook, so at least I can hope she didn’t.

Anyway every year I get to November and think “OH LORD OH NO IT IS CLASSICAL SEASON - WHYYY did I not work out harder from August to now?” and then I do a few mad swims and get through it somehow. However this year I am older than I have been any other year (it’s asTOUNDing the insights you will encounter in this series) and we have just come off the worst two years and the worst two summers for exercise of my life. There was the Black Summer of 2019 when they shut the pools because of air quality, then there was lockdown and they really shut the pools, then shingles and then recovery from shingles, then a summer when I hardly got in the water, a mad 6 months of work, then the BIG lockdown, then they finally opened MY pool (ITAC) but SHUT the LR that goes there…

I have nice middle-class parents with high standards, and normally I would berate myself for weakness, laziness, stupidity and gormlessness, thinking if I yelled at myself hard enough it would motivate me. However, after that lot, even I am not up to trying to shame myself into change. What are ya gonna do?

Anyway here we are at the end of the year and I have to perform of course, and I have recently bought some crippled old-lady exercise equipment that I can use RIGHT HERE in the studio and now I just have to do that agonising habit-pruning stuff, where I stop typing or transposing or learning songs or practicing or trying to get government money and a) roll this little spiky purple ball around the wall with my back and my bum b) squeeze a ring thing with my knees c) balance on a wobble cushion and d) do other physical jerks, about four times a day.

Change sucks and having to generate change yourself is THE. WORST. but if I can’t get out because of the work mountain, the BASIC FITNESS REQUIREMENT for singing means I HAVE TO EXERCISE right here in the studio. Stand by for some embarrassing time lapse videos on Facebook!

BTW the photo is of me in about 2010, having my self-diagnosed arachnophobia cured in a ONE DAY TREATMENT at Taronga Zoo where they threw EVERYTHING at your irrational fears - exposure, information, hypnotherapy, whatever. It worked. Change is possible.