Keeping fit
Jeremy Clarke
Both of our upright vacuum cleaners broke down last week. I found a repair shop in Yellow Pages and took them along, and who should be behind the counter but Barry, my karate sensei. As well as being a friend, as my karate sensei Barry is also a sort of informal spiritual mentor. But I haven't attended his dojo for over a year, nor have I bothered to contact him. So my own pleasure at meeting him again was tinged with guilt.
I bowed and handed over the vacuum cleaners. We swapped news. It's been a bad year for Barry. He's been convicted of drink driving — he only had one pint of lager — and banned for a year. Then he had an emergency of some kind connected with his repair work, took a chance, got caught, and was given an extra six-month ban for driving while disqualified. He was also sentenced to 150 hours of community service on Dartmoor. On top of that, the day before he had to go to court his mum died.
Worst of all, his karate club has all but folded. He'd employed a 7th dan black belt to teach the senior grades, but this 7th dan's heavy-duty, X-certificate style of karate had frightened everybody away. Some nights Barry would turn up for training, he said, and he'd be the only one there. The only glad note in his annus horn-bilis was that his wife has run off with a brown belt. 'Peace at last,' said Barry. 'The only woman I've ever known who could put her lipstick on and shout at me at the Same time.'
He asked me how I was keeping fit. 'Yoga, Barry,' I said. 'I've learnt more about my body in a year of practising yoga,' I told him. 'than I have in ten years of kicking anti punching the air at your poxy karate club.' Barry said he could well believe it. The crumpet was probably better as well, he said. I told him it was, and why, therefore, didn't he come and check it out one evening?
Barry has been teaching karate for 30 years. He is unusually short, and a kinder, more conscientious, more violent man you couldn't hope to meet. Of all the targets presented by a human opponent, in the first instance Barry generally goes for the throat. 'Because I'm small, see? It's always there, right in front of me.' But he didn't sneer at my invitation to try out a gentle activity whose ultimate goal is the merging of the individual consciousness with the universal. Going on what he'd heard, he said, it might even speed his recovery from a dislocated shoulder. So on Monday, Barry, puncher of throats, came to yoga.
He was late arriving and the class was full. The only available space was right in front of the teacher. Nicole is tall, slender (I've seen more fat on a butcher's pencil), graceful as a swan, and supremely 'fit' in both the traditional and the modern slang sense of the word. Barry, short, squat and his love of violence written all over his face, eyed her warily through eyeballs directly in line with, and about 18 inches away from, Nicole's chest. Then away we went, stretching this way and that, trying to remember to keep what Nicole calls our 'tail bones' tucked in.
I tried not to look at Barry as one tries not to look at the results of a serious car accident. But one couldn't help noticing that a lifetime of shotokan karate had in no way prepared Barry for the one-legged 'tree' pose, for example. To begin with it looked as though his tree was going to topple over forwards. Then it was even money for it to fall over backwards. When it finally did go, it took everyone by surprise by crashing down sideways and knocking down almost an entire row of other trees in domino fashion.
Nor had all that kicking and punching prepared him for something as relatively simple as the triangle pose. For Barry to get anywhere near the required effect, Nicole had to straddle him and lever his shoulder around using her lovely knee as a pivot. His anguished cries were horrible to listen to.
'A-ha!' cried Nicole. 'Was that a click? Oh-oh, there it goes again!'
We finished up, as usual, lying in the corpse pose. After an hour and a half of gentle yoga, this was a pose at which Barry excelled. He lay there in a pool of his own sweat as if dead. And as usual Nicole turned out the lights and sang to us corpses, in Sanskrit, to the accompaniment of a sitar. I half opened an eye and saw her leaning over Barry and singing softly in his ear.
'You set me up you bastard,' was all he kept saying in the pub afterwards.
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