Decided that the best way to lose weight was to do exercise, so joined a small locallish evening yoga class. The teacher was fifty-plus, with a cake-eating frame. ( I say this kindly, as a cake-eater myself). Quite a lot of her drooped, too.(So maybe she had only just started teaching. Which probably explains why her class wasn’t popular.) And her hair was dyed a peculiar mottled orange and cut to resemble Friar Tuck’s.Anyhoo, she was extremely welcoming, and smily. Present were: four pensioners, a man with strangely dark,greasy clothes, who hid himself away at the back, as if worried that he smelled - and an Asian girl in a tracksuit, who constantly nipped into the corridor to talk to her husband on her mobile. To begin with, I was glad that the place was not bulging with beautiful over-muscled people in Spandex (or whatever the yoga equivalent is), but then the melancholy setting began to get to me. The pensioners and Asian girl seemed despondent; the greasy man was clearly severely depressed, and the yoga teacher, though she kept smiling, was obviously finding it hard to be upbeat. And then I began to notice strange under-currents. The teacher reserved a note of gentle, but persistent criticism for the Asian girl, ‘No, try a little harder, Lavali’. ’Did you hear what I said, Lavali? You’re not very good at that, are you?’ And she began making offish remarks to me, under the guise of being helpful. So she’d say: ‘Is that all right for your back?’ And I’d say ‘Fine!’ back, brightly. And then she’d say something like: ‘No osteoporosis, then?’ or ‘This one is especially good if you are going through the menopause.’ And she definitely wasn’t looking at anyone else when she said that. After an hour or so I was feeling pretty dismayed. Also, I hadn’t brought a mat, and the floor smelled gym-shoey. And then my hair and hands did. In fact, by the end I felt so terrible that it was a shock to look in a mirror and NOT see a bent-over crone, glowing from one final, post-menstrual flush.
