Kia ora koutou, please may I just have a break from experts and others telling me I need to do more exercise? I need to make contact with people, I need to reach out.

There seems to be a plethora of these happy and healthy people all wanting to give me the benefit of their experience and wisdom. If they’re not telling me I need to walk more, they’re saying I should join an exercise class or a club, because, although I might not realise it, they sense I’m sad and miserable and probably depressed. I have to be you see  because I live on my own.

Every time they refer to me, in their kind and caring way, as the elderly, I want to leap up and put my elderly hands around their healthy exercised neck and strangle them.

I have spent most of my life if not running at least moving very fast just to get things done and out of the way so I can sit down and read or work – used to be at the typewriter, now its the computer, all good exercise for hands arms and brain.

Housework is all about thinking, planning and movement. Take the laundry for example. I’m bending and sorting, then placing it in the machine, then when its washed, I’m lugging it to the line, stretching up, bending again, lifting, as I peg it on the line. Ditto some hours later when, dry and ready to be folded and put away, I bring it inside. I do very little ironing these days but I do do some and that’s all movement too.

I have two hours cleaning help each week so I don’t do it all but there’s still lots that happens on a daily basis, all requiring movement.

I walk in and out to clear the letter box and while the Lilliput library seems to look after itself (with some help from its friends) I still check the books and give it a wipe over when needed. I stand at the kitchen bench and peel vegetables (very very carefully) and, as you know, I bake. I pick rhubarb and silver beet, pluck the odd tomato and strawberry, all standing/bending activities, I think I can probably say quite truthfully that over the course of a day I’d be doing at least a couple of hours movement.

On the radio the guy says how good exercise is for the elderly. He thinks we don’t know?

He extolls the virtue of fresh air, the pleasures of walking, how it lifts the spirit. I wonder who makes his bed, washes his clothes, hangs them out, shops for food, prepares his healthy well–masticated meals, runs around like a spinning jenny so he’s free to talk about exercise?

As for those who say that painful joints feel better after exercise, forget it. I can tell you categorically that they hurt more after exercise than they did before. However, if these experts mean that the rest of me does better if I make my sore joints move then what they need to be saying is not that its good for my joints but that its a treat for my heart, lungs and liver etc… but again, I remind them, movement is movement, so if I’m doing things that keep me clean and well fed then I’m moving.

Exercise classes can get your heart rate up, your muscles trim, but can also be very fraught. I remember bending over and up, arms moving to the right and to the left and the friend next to me doing the same, all while we’re both singing loudly along to the music, ‘Operator, operator, get me Jesus on the line…’ and me hissing to her in an aside, ‘I hope to God no–one’s doing a video of this. Anyone sees us two singing about getting Jesus on the line, we’re toast.’

And then we both had to stop singing because we were laughing so much. Oh well, as the Old Wives said, ‘Laughter is the best medicine.’

Renée