Jane Alexander's Blog, page 6

Bridget's exercises for better sight, without glasses

Anyhow, a few of you wanted to hear about Bridget’s eye exercises.  They reminded me of my mother, actually, as Mum used to try all these natural methods for improving eyesight.  She’d walk around wearing pin-hole glasses (she bought me a pair too but they just gave me headaches) and she spent hours staring at a Tibetan eye chart (she bought me one of those too but I admit I got bored and stopped staring.)
And then I got to thinking about how my brother used to stare at the sun every...

Zombie weight-lifting

I’m wrecked again.  A bit of a car crash.  Limping on one foot.  Typing one handed.  Sitting is sort of painful.  My ears are kinda ringing.  But hey, in the scheme of things, it could be worse.  A lot worse.  Let's look on the bright side.  Because, as I said to James when he was whining recently, things can always be worse.  I mean, we could be living in a prison surrounded by zombies, with nutjob psychos attacking us from the outside a...

Live for your lovers by loving your liver - liver flushing for life-lorn lovers (or vice versa)

Funny how things come along in bunches, eh?  Lately it’s been all about livers.  Bunches of livers flocking around me, all wailing and wincing.  What an image, huh?  Can livers flock? Can they bunch? Can they wail and wince?
A few years back, my GP raised her eyebrows and said my liver was unhappy.  Mild understatement really.  Bottom line?  I was drinking too much alcohol.  Now, nobody likes to be told what to do, right?  And our psyches have a cur...

I AM ASBO

Poor Asbo.

He is blind.  So blind.  He turns his head, bewildered, staring around with blank eyes.

He is lost.  Almost always so very lost.
He eats.  He sleeps.  He pisses and shits.
He barks for no reason, none that can be discerned anyhow.

If you were feeling fanciful, you might say he howls into the void.

He licks the sofa.  Repeatedly.  For hours.  Mindless activity? Meditation?  Dementia?

If someone shows him affection, he wags his tail.  Or h...

Life according to Bridget - life lessons from a nearly ninety year old yogi

Age.  Ageing.  It’s a bugger, huh?  So many people I know just accept it as inevitable that, once they hit fifty, it’s pretty much all over save the hovering up after the party.  There seems to be this inbuilt sense of inevitability about it all.  That that’s it really…one’s body is going to collapse, one’s mind is going to wander (rather than wonder), and that, if one hasn’t achieved one’s goals by now, there’s not much point in even trying.
And you know what? ...

Holes - meditations on change and pain

You know what?  Right now I can barely type.  My arms feel as if they belong to someone else entirely.  Why?  Well, Nick, the instructor at my little local gym, had devised me a new set of programmes and today was my first upper body session.  I’m using mainly free weights now although he snuck in a killer series on the TRX.  Ouch.  Ouch. Ouch. Anyhow, it’s all good.  No, I’m not a masochist, well, not more than anyone else really, but if you want to pr...

Mapping the Kabbalistic Tree of Life onto houses, as you do...

For the last ten years or so I have had this recurring dream.  I am in a large house.  It usually starts off being The Old Rectory, the first house we lived in when we moved from London, but then I realise there are parts of it I didn’t know were there.  I walk through whole wings, endless bedrooms, hidden corridors, dusty echoing spaces.  Firstly I feel overwhelmed.  How can I cope with all this?  And then comes a feeling of mounting dread.  There is some e...

You can't tell the universe to piss off, can you?

Where were we?  Oh yes.  Sitting alone in Jane’s flat, talking to Prue.  Well, you know, for all I like my own company, sometimes I do get a bit lonely. And that week was very very strange. Okay, let's be honest, I was pretty low.  But you can't give up, right?  You can't just throw in the towel and...give up. Surely, I thought, there is some kind of balance?  Some way of living that lies between monastic solitude and…babble?  
And then an email pinged in. ...

Prue and I in London being a bit Myers-Briggs about it all

I didn’t tell you about my silent retreat in London, did I?  Jane was going away and so I said I’d cat-sit (a feral cat decided, about a year ago, that Jane needed taking in hand and so moved herself in).  She’s called Prue (short for Dear Prudence Xanthe Antigone Isis Zampa-Narford). She is, quite possibly, the plainest cat in the world, with unfortunate markings that give her a faintly Hitler-esque air.  I click my heels when I see her which makes Jane roll her eyebrows (of c...

Mike June and Jess Klein play live at the Exmoor Beastro - I listen.

Back in the day, I used to go to several gigs a week but now I’m lucky if I get to see one a year.  Jane whisks me off, of course, from time to time but she tends to favour big stadiums or vast Mancunian fields.  And, really, I much prefer smaller, more intimate venues.  Like the Exmoor Beastro,in fact. 
The Beastro is a café/restaurant/whatever in Dulverton.  The owners are passionate, nay – evangelical - about good food and drink, and champion artisanal producers. ...