‘I can do it!’

Recently I got to sing and play with a bunch of lovely strangers. Let me tell you, once you have been hoisted aloft by two strong men whilst belting out the closing lines of ‘I can do it!’, there’s no going back. Never heard that song? Me neither, until seconds before the words and tune came out of my mouth. It was the final number in an improvised mini musical set in the Juilliard Music School, New York. I was a flautist who’d finally conquered her confidence issues. I don’t know what it sounded or looked like to the improvisers watching, all I know is how it felt – and it was fan-flipping-tastic! In that moment, arms stretched to the ceiling, voice soaring, I was Liza Minnelli, Bette Midler and a dash of Ethel Merman all rolled up together.

This was just one of multiple life-affirming moments I experienced during The Maydays’ improv intensive at Osho Leela, a retreat centre in Dorset. I loved it all, but I REALLY loved the musical improv.

I’ve always enjoyed singing – never in a formal capacity, you understand – school choirs were for kids who sang from the same (hymn) sheet, whereas I was a self-styled maverick teenager, intent on cutting off my proverbial nose to spite my flawlessly made-up face.

At home it was different. In the privacy of my own bedroom I sang my heart out. Years later I found out my mum learned to gauge my general health by whether or not I was singing. Forty years on, it’s still the same. Sadness or sickness render me voiceless.

Neither of my parents were musical, as such, although my dad has a great singing voice and could always be found at the end of family parties in the company of his brothers – six of them together on a good night- pints in hand, working their way through all the old London classics. What a treat to have heard them. Today – who knows? – they might have made it onto Gareth Malone’s Naked Choir. They’d have certainly given it their all.

I used to love musicals when I was growing up. My earliest memory of theatre going was a trip to London for my eleventh birthday to see the original production of Grease. Several years ahead of the blockbuster film version, it starred TV actor Paul Nicholas as Danny and ‘Evita in waiting’ Elaine Page as Sandy. I was mesmerised. I was hooked.

Then, at some point in my early 20s, my love affair with musicals ended. They were silly and frivolous, which, of course, generally, is their whole point. You don’t go to see a musical for the complex storyline and nuanced character development. You go for the knockout songs that course through your bloodstream for days afterwards. My mum has never forgotten the time I took her to see Joseph at a theatre in Middlesbrough. And I will always remember the sight of my mum – a woman who normally shuns any kind of attention – standing up, dancing and clapping along to the reprise of ‘Any Dream Will Do’, face lit up like a Christmas tree.

I reckon you can’t beat that kind of musical high. So, ‘Power Ballad, Fame School, La Scala top-billing’ Melanie is back, and from now on I shall be seeking more opportunities to let my singing voice out to play and giving my inner diva all the encouragement she needs.

Generation Games

In the early 1970s I used to love the BBC’s It’s a Knockout. It was the sheer physical comedy of the show and (subsequent grim revelations aside) host Stuart Hall’s helpless laughter that got me every time.

For anyone unfamiliar with the format, teams from different regions of the UK dressed up in silly costumes to compete across a range of games. Typically, contestants might be required to transport multiple buckets of water on their heads, blindfolded and riding a unicycle, with team-mates barking instructions at them. The best UK team went on to compete in the international version of the show, Jeux Sans Frontières. It was where I first learned the German for ‘left’ and ‘right’.

Something similar occurs at my family’s Mini Olympics every August Bank Holiday Monday. Each year my brother, as official Gamemaker, comes up with a host of new and evermore inventive – some might say bonkers – ‘events’ designed to challenge and entertain us. He has his work cut out for him – the age of the participants can range from four to eighty-four. But, clipboard and stopwatch in hand, he ensures an atmosphere of inclusivity and fairness.

One of the best things about the Mini Olympics is that – not unlike It’s a Knockout – the more seriously you take the events, the more ridiculous you appear. I defy anyone to maintain a competitive edge whilst attempting to knock over a row of skittles with a ball dangling from their head. In fact, you are far more likely to succeed in these Olympics if you don’t try. My highly non-competitive sister-in-law, one of the eventual joint ‘winners’, levelled the skittles with such speed and ease that, if it had been the actual Olympics, there would have almost certainly been calls for a drugs test.

But what I really love about our Mini Olympics is that, with all the differences of generation, temperament, beliefs and opinions, get us being playful together – dribbling a rugby ball around an obstacle course with a broom or flinging old handbags as if it were the hammer throw – and we’re just one big silly, but happy family.

Playing for laughs

I’ve always played to win. I’m from a competitive family. No game was too trivial to be taken seriously. Rules were there for a reason. And there was no such thing as a friendly.

My mum was the exception. Maybe it was a survival tactic, but she’s always taken the view that if somebody else wants to win that much, then just let them. Okay, so it wouldn’t work for Team GB, but it’s a sound approach for the home.

Improv, like my mum, has a healthy attitude to ‘losing’. That’s why it’s good for me. For a start it’s a collaboration, not a competition. It teaches us to make our scene partners look good, rather than ourselves, and we soon learn that the best thing we can do for the sake of a good scene may be to ‘lose’. In one class I teach, students are paired up for a mimed tug of war. The first time they do it, veins bulge, cheeks puff, faces redden, and nobody gives way. This is because a) it’s great fun and b) we are hard-wired to win, even when it’s make believe. In the next round, the students are invited to look into each other’s eyes, determine who wants to win the most and let them. My mum would love it.

Now I just have to bring some of that improv sense to my daily life. Take the swing ball game I played with my sister at a recent family sports day. Neither of us were prepared to give an inch, both risking aggravation of neck, back and shoulder problems as we bashed a tennis ball on a string around a whirligig. With no end in sight, my sister’s Sharapova squeals reduced us to helpless laughter. I don’t remember who won.

I lost a lot when I was growing up, mainly by virtue of having an older brother with even greater competitive instincts than my own. Every game we played – Subbuteo, chess, snooker, Monopoly, tennis, Cluedo, The Business Game (which could last for days), even snail-racing – was tainted by the need to win and a strict adherence to ‘the rules’.

You’d think all those years of losing would have made me better at it. But no, I continued to be a sore loser right into my twenties and thirties. It wasn’t pretty. I remember, to my shame, not allowing my niece to change the rules of a game she was losing. I guess I thought it would teach her a valuable lesson. Rules are to be followed. Life is hard. Whereas all it taught her was not to play games with her uptight auntie.

At least, nowadays, I mostly manage to be gracious in defeat. I let a 7-year old think he’d beaten me at pool at the family day. It was worth it for the grin on his face. But I’m not saying I’ve kicked my shameful habit. The competitive flame still burns brightly when I play Scrabble with my parents or cards with J. And there’s still a part of me that wants to throw my toys out of the pram when I lose, especially when my brother is involved.

So even if I never wholly overcome my desire to win, I’m trying to take games less seriously and find new ways to play – playing for laughs, rather than victory. At least some of the time.

Possession

Between us, J and I managed to lose my camera on our recent holiday. It was two days before the end of a fortnight’s camping trip, which included a week in the Cairngorms. I know – that’s a lot of photographs to lose for one tiny lapse in concentration. Still, friends and family will be cheered to know they are spared an evening of endless shots of Dog Features swathed in fleecy blankets to ward off impending hypothermia (boy, did it get cold at night). And, let’s face it – sob – how many photos do we need of ourselves with stunning – sob – mountain backdrops? Well, ONE would have been nice. But, hey, it’s all still up there if we want to see it. Only an eight-hour, 450-mile drive away from the flatlands of Cambridgeshire.

Anyway, before some benevolent soul starts crowdfunding our return trip, I’ll get to the real point of this post.

It wasn’t the understandable sadness about the lost photos that surprised me, it was the extent of my grief at the lost camera. How could I – a staunch non-materialist – have invested so much emotion in a completely replaceable lump of already outdated plastic?

There is a kind of logic in my grief, though. Since its purchase in 2010, nearly five years to the day, that camera has documented so much of my life, been to so many different places with me, seen what I’ve seen. More than that, I believe it’s helped me to notice things I would have missed, allowed me to observe the world differently.

It’s the same with my bicycle. At the ripe old age of 22, it still gets me from A to B and even attracts positive attention from bike mechanics. It has little monetary value anymore and 99% of people would, I am sure, have replaced it years ago. But I cannot – no, I will not part with that bike until it crumbles to dust under me (or, perhaps, more safely, while it’s in the garden shed.) In our younger days, that bike and I pedalled hundreds of miles together in search of adventure and new landscapes. But it’s not just the literal journeys we’ve been on together – sampling the patisseries of Northern France, flogging up the switchbacks of the Picos d’Europa, squelching along the rain-drenched west coast of Ireland – hell no, the bond goes way deeper than that. A true and loyal friend, it has lasted the test of time and no shiny new mountain bike or sexy hybrid is going to turn my head.

So, maybe I am some kind of sad fetishist, with over-attachment issues, but I like to think of my few valued possessions as Emily thought of Bagpuss, her cloth cat. They may be battered, obsolete, saggy, and a bit loose at the seams, but Melanie loves them.

Vocation Vocation Vocation

Vocation-wise, there is a tradition of late development in our family. You could call us late bloomers, but I’d prefer it if you didn’t. My brother, my sister and I all left school unclear of our future paths, and one by one we found them – or, perhaps, they found us. I went into education, my brother entered the Church and my sister became a solicitor.

I’ve been known to joke that for the want of a close relative in the military, we could have been a Jane Austen novel. One of my nieces may be about to oblige in that respect. In a couple of weeks’ time, all being well, she will have completed her initial training to join the army. By all accounts she has risen to every challenge and is positively thriving. And as she is twenty-six and went straight from school to work, she is continuing in the family tradition rather nicely.

It sometimes crosses my mind that having parents whose only aspirations for us were to be ‘happy and healthy’ might have held us back in some way. There was never any pressure for us to go to university. How much more might we have achieved if, as in so many other families, there had been that almost implicit expectation of us from an early age? I sense we would have still ended up where we are now, only with a little less happiness and health.

When we left school with our various qualifications, it was a time when if you’d had a decent enough education you could get a decent enough job. I imagine my siblings, like me, enjoyed being out in the world of work. And when the enjoyment wore off, good fortune and a lot of hard work enabled us to pursue our different careers, as our parents cheered us on gently from the sidelines.

Today, the pressure for young people to aspire and achieve is greater than ever. I should know – I used to be an admissions tutor at a Cambridge college. A large part of my time was spent raising aspirations and encouraging school students to aim high in their university choices. Having left all that behind a couple of years ago, I’m still a great believer in the power of higher education to enrich and transform the lives of some young (and older) people, despite the threefold increase in fees.

But I believe equally in the rights of other young (and older) people to do things differently, so that the transformation can occur later, perhaps more circuitously, and definitely more than once. I’m enjoying my second (or possibly third) re-invention right now. I suspect that, over the years, the opportunities to make big life changes have greatly reduced for large sections of the population. I suspect that this is only going to get worse. But, every now and then I hear of someone, like my niece, who has found a vocation and I’m glad for them. Very glad.

I wish I could smell like my dog

I let the dog take me for a walk last week.

She hadn’t been well and clearly wasn’t enjoying the walks I’d been in charge of – trailing along behind me, stopping every time I looked round – so instead of playing yet another game of Grandmother’s Footsteps, I gave her the lead.

We started and finished in the small patch of woods near my house. It became quickly evident that, given the choice, the dog would be very happy sniffing at lots of things, weeing on some of them, and then going home. Several long minutes were spent at one patch of nettles alone, as she conducted her forensic investigation.

Now that it was my turn to trail behind her, I got a tough lesson in ‘being’ rather than ‘doing’. I want Movement and Progress when I take the dog out. This isn’t a walk, it’s a sniff! I fretted, as she circled a clump of grass for the third time. The dog moved on, but all too soon a voice in my head was shrieking, You’re going back to that pile of stones and broken bricks again? Really!?

But while I was standing there shifting from foot to foot, fighting the urge to stride off, I experienced the woods differently. I was looking down, rather than across; into, instead of beyond. I wasn’t just hearing birdsong, I was listening to birds. And, of course, there were the smells – sweet and bitter, familiar and curious.

I wish I could say that I got down on all fours, thrust my nose into a bunch of weeds and entered a magical, olfactory world denied to other humans. Sadly, I’m short of 100 million scent glands or so. But putting the dog in charge for a change put me back in touch with my senses. It enlivened a familiar landscape. And it reminded me that going for a walk doesn’t have to be putting one foot in front of the other. Sometimes it’s good to follow your nose.

Daydream believer

I’m sure I hadn’t heard anyone speak openly of it for years. Probably because it’s one of those private things people do, but don’t talk about. Then within days of each other, two unconnected people – a child and an adult – mentioned it, and I felt a twinge of regret. Somewhere along the line I seem to have lost the art of daydreaming.

Maybe my adult censor – like a jealous landowner – curbed my mind’s right to roam. Of course, It doesn’t help that Walter Mitty has become a byword for dangerous fantasist. And nowadays with everyone seeking mindfulness or mindlessness, what chance does daydreaming have? How can our minds range across pastures familiar and new if we are either always to be ‘in the moment’, or in constant upload mode?

And yet surely daydreaming is playfulness for the mind, and those harmless reveries we lose ourselves in have a role to play in our general well being? So perhaps, like many other things that make us feel good, it needs practice.

Minds naturally wander, right? It’s just as an adult they’re more likely to stray into the worry department or get off at the planning floor. In mindfulness meditation we’re invited to gently lead our wandering thoughts back to the breath. A daydreaming practice would encourage the mind to leave behind ‘the moment’. No daydream would be too ordinary or too fanciful. So a daydream in which you are simply sitting in your favourite armchair looking out at the garden, a glass of wine in one hand, a book in the other, is good enough – it could be a life saver if you’re only ten minutes into a three hour audit meeting. And if you find yourself, arms aloft, crossing the finishing line of that marathon you’ve been wanting to do for years, give yourself a rousing cheer.

When your daydreaming, at any point in the waking day you can be anyone, go anywhere. And nobody need ever know. You will never have to see your daydream founder or turn to dust as it goes through the mill of language. It will be forever pure and perfect and yours.

Isn’t it a lovely day (to go out in the rain)?

Weather. It’s no respecter of wealth and status. It can’t be used to bribe the electorate. It refuses to be pinned down from one day to the next. I know. It’s such a cliché – Brits talking about the weather – and believe me, most of the time I point blank refuse to discuss it. There are people close to me – you know who you are – who regularly torture themselves with weather forecasts. I, on the other hand, glaze over at the first mention of depressions or six-month heatwaves starting on Tuesday fortnight. Even when I actively try to listen to weather forecasts on the radio, I can guarantee I’ve zoned out before they reach the east of England. But that’s not because of any indifference to the weather on my part. I love weather. I just don’t want to know what it’s meant to be doing today or in a week’s time. I’m not heading out in a fishing boat any time soon. I don’t have crops or livestock to protect. And there is little risk of flooding or hurricanes where I live and travel to. Really – I can afford to take the risk of getting caught in torrential rain or, as happened recently, facing four days of glorious sunshine in the Yorkshire Dales (which, I am told, hadn’t been forecast) with no sunblock and a suitcase of thermals and woolly garments.

The thing is I like the weather’s surprises and mischief. I like its unpredictability. In most other areas of my life, I’d prefer certainty. One of the reasons I do improv is to get better at uncertainty. The only thing that you can be sure of in an improv scene is that it will start and, at some point, end. Like life. But for some reason, I find the uncertainty of the weather strangely thrilling. It helps that there’s not really any weather I actively don’t like. As someone said, there’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing – and anyway, none of it seems to hang around for long. The day after I left Yorkshire it rained. Last week I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. This morning there was fog and the central heating was back on.

In my hazy memory weather did seem to behave better and stick to proper seasons when I was a child. They didn’t need a roof at Wimbledon. White Christmases were more than just a dream. Small creatures knew when to hibernate and when to wake up again. So, yes, I am concerned that our unpredictable climate might have more than a little to do with our reckless treatment of the ozone layer. But I also like to think it’s down to meteorological sheer bloody mindedness.

As I finish writing this, the sun is blazing down out of a cloudless sky. I can’t wait to see what’s coming next.

Oh Captain Podlark!

I grew up with the TV costume dramas of the 1970s, so I approached the re-make of Poldark with a mix of curiosity and nostalgia – and found myself watching three episodes in as many days. Ah, brave new world that has iPlayer in it!

Of course, back in the day – pre-digital, pre-VHS – there was no option for such shameless gorging and there was no reprieve if, heaven forfend, you missed an espisode. Lives had to be structured around TV schedules, not the other way round. There was none of this pausing mid-real time viewing while you put a second coat of emulsion on the bathroom walls. Even if it was ITV you’d be lucky to get the kettle filled during the advert breaks they were so fleeting – happy days!

The other thing that has happened in the forty years since Poldark first hit our screens is the costume drama parody. It’s just all so funny now. Every close up of a smouldering look or heaving bosom, all those long shots of Ross Poldark astride his horse galloping along the cliff top. And then there are the hilarious servants – Jud and Prudie, or French and Saunders as I cannot help thinking of them. But the absolute killer – the thing that took the series to a whole new level – was the sublime line of dialogue uttered by match-making mother Mrs Teague. Hell bent on persuading our hero to sample her daughter’s delights, she assured him, ‘One has only to taste her syllabubs to know their succulence.’ Victoria Wood couldn’t have penned it, or delivered it, any better.

I’ve no doubt my thirteen-year-old self would have thrilled at the prospect of watching back-to-back episodes of her favourite TV programmes, instead of all that annoying waiting. And the comic potential of costume dramas would have delighted the playful rebel and clown in her, as it does me. But I can’t help feeling that something rather special has been lost in the process.

The undeniable dogness of being

I aim to be in the moment for at least ten minutes every day. Every so often, Dog Features – our elderly lurcher – will punctuate my entire ten minute meditation with various and assorted reminders of her presence. I have come to think of it as her performance piece.

This is how it starts. DF will be stretched out in her bed asleep. I will settle down in my chair, select the meditation app on my phone, and close my eyes. After a few seconds, a gong quietly sounds.

Instantly, she is up and tip-tapping her way across the laminate flooring. Her arrival in the kitchen is heralded by a triumphant crunching of dog biscuits, then a rhythmic lapping of water. More tip-tapping signals her return to the living room. There is an electric pause as she stands in front of me (I can feel her stare), followed by a dramatic flumping back down into her bed, a wracking sigh and a burp. But it doesn’t end there – for now, there is licking to do, as some part of her anatomy is washed. At length. Finally, in case my attention is wavering, she closes with smacking sounds more usually associated with the wearing of ill-fitting dentures.

The gong chimes. Silence falls once more.

Of course, there is nothing to stop me meditating in a different room or shutting the door. I could wear ear plugs. But all that movement and rhythm and emotion has got to be telling me something about just ‘being’.

And then there’s the humour. At some point – usually around the water lapping section – I’ll start to smile. By the time she’s got to the flumping and sighing, I’ll be giggling like a schoolgirl. So although I may only return my attention to my breathing fleetingly, the place I come back from is always joyful.

Meditation with Dog – the next big thing?