Kangaroos can send spirits soaring

My aunt Barbara was a volatile person who, in times of stress, resorted to standing on her head. She learned the art while she was nursing in London.
I can still picture her upside-down in her floral pyjamas, and I won't pretend it was an elegant sight. But she had the magical grace of a white heron landing in moss-carpeted forest in filtered sunlight compared to my own efforts in that department.
It is painful to recall the yoga episode. It's right up there with a pair of red and black platform shoes that I was once devoted to. I should have known better than to try, since I only ever coped with PE classes at school by sticking to the back of the queue while other girls soared airily over the twin instruments of torture known as the box and the horse, landing briskly on the other side with Prussian heel clicks.
The word for my efforts - and I mean this charitably - was lumbering. I lumbered. Like one of those huge old planes in 1950s war comics, I ground along the tarmac of the gym, building to a lumbering attempt at leaping. Had I been such a plane, hundreds would have perished in the crash.
How those lithe little girls who actually looked fetching in their gym gear smirked, and how the gym teacher sneered. I've avoided strenuous exercise ever since.
Some years later, I was persuaded that yoga would help me deal with stress, the permanent condition of any working journalist. I linked up with a group of thin people who talked in hushed tones and could control their breathing as well as their arms and legs, people who did groovy little exercises even as they held their muted, spiritual conversations. I tried the simplest poses, and after two sessions, gave up. The memory of my failures is even worse than the memory of platform shoes.
It was with cynicism, then, that I read this week that yoga calms irregular heart beats and anxiety. The giveaway was the name of the lead study author, Dhanunjaya Lakkireddy, associate professor of medicine at the University of Kansas Hospital.
A person with such a name will be genetically endowed with the ability to form graceful and complicated poses. A person from my gene pool is better suited to digging up turnips or lugging sheep about. It's cruel to expect otherwise.
How much more realistic a solution, surely, is that of the Oklahoma woman suffering from depression who is treating her condition by looking after a disabled kangaroo. As an alternative to men, who are more often used by single women for medicinal purposes, this sounds like sheer brilliance.
Christie Carr was given the animal, whose name is Irwin, to care for after she tried to kill herself a year ago. Irwin had crashed into a fence and become paralysed. For the past year Carr has devoted herself to him, dressing him in human clothes, driving him about in a child's car seat, changing his nappy, generally caring for him like a child, and quite forgetting her suicidal wish. Irwin has been certified as a therapy pet under the Americans with Disabilities Act, but there's a bureaucratic glitch. For Carr to take him to events and fund-raisers, Irwin must have a legal residence. But Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, does not allow wild and exotic pets within city limits. Carr is seeking an exemption for Irwin, probably on the understandable grounds that he is far less antisocial than most eligible men of her acquaintance.
The city's lawyer is against the idea on the grounds that Irwin could become aggressive and kick somebody. Irwin's vet says that's nonsense. A tearful Carr claims that Irwin believes she's his mother, which possibly she does too at this point, and that God brought them together.
There is nothing unreasonable in that. But on the whole I would rather have a yoga person as a therapeutic pet. Watching them at their poses would be very soothing, and they have the advantage of being house trained.