To my amazement, and no doubt to the amazement of anyone who has ever known me, I have taken up exercising. Let’s not get carried away. I have taken up walking. For an hour, most days.
Greg, ever encouraging, says that I am barely even walking, more like wafting. It is certainly true that I don’t stride along Fitbitting, whatever that is. I most certainly don’t do that arm-pumping stuff.
I already look like a dick in my raggedy shorts, and socks that look as though they came from the secondhand shop where retired circus clowns send their old costumes to die.
I don’t wear serious power-walker gear such as those tight, bicycling-length, Lycra legging things. I don’t want to look like a complete dick. Also, I wouldn’t want to be sued for causing a driver to lose control due to hysterical laughing thus causing a serious traffic accident.
The really astonishing aspect of this “exercising” is that I love it. I spent PE classes at secondary school hiding behind bushes, fagging away on menthol cigs. The clouds of smoke may have been a bit of a giveaway.
I never really learnt to swim more than a few strokes before sinking to the bottom of the pool. I most certainly never learnt to dive, which I believed and still believe to be pointless and dangerous.
This did not prevent a sadistic PE teacher from making me compete in the annual swimming competitions. I started on the side of the pool nearest to the edge and performed my few strokes before sinking. This made me the clown of the swimming carnival and ought to have been classified as child abuse.
You don’t see many people walking on our country roads. There is one geezer, out in all weathers in his high-vis vest and enormous moustache.
He is not friendly. Unfriendly people in the country are known as people not worth wasting a wave on. If you see someone in a car, or more likely a ute or a truck, or on a horse or a tractor, you wave, and they wave back. Wave may be overstating it.
A country wave means a lift of the hand or the reins. And the merest lifting of a chin. You don’t see many cars. When you do, it is usually driven by somebody you know. Because only weirdos walk in the country, they invariably stop and offer you a lift.
On my first day of walking, the southerly got up and it started pouring. I was half an hour from home. I straggled on, wringing wet and shivering. June, the rural postie, pulled up in her van, stopped and shouted, “Get in. Look at you. Didn’t you know it was going to rain?”
Country people always know when it is going to rain by looking at the cloud formations, sniffing the air and observing the angle their cows’ ears are pointing in. I may have made that last one up, but it’s got to be more reliable than MetService.
It is peaceful walking in the country on those wide, empty roads with the Tararua Range ahead of you. There are things to look at: cows, sheep, alpacas, horses and dogs. I don’t much like dogs.
But country dogs are well-behaved and well-contained. They have to be. You don’t want your valuable farm dogs getting out onto the road.
Stock are moved on country roads and if your mutt gets out and attacks a sheep, the farmer will shoot your dog. Not a country court in the land would convict them. Country rules apply and quite right, too.
You are guaranteed to see those wonderful, soaring, golden-winged native hawks. They barely move their wide, wide wings and glide across – if you are walking on a lucky day – clear blue skies, silently serene.
They are poetry in slow motion. You cannot help but admire their beauty. Unless you are a baby rabbit and an ominous shadow appears above you. In which case: Oma, rāpeti (run, rabbit). Oma, oma, oma.
