Venus of Schwarzenegger

My orchids are bloomin' lovely!

I am Venus.

The Venus of Willendorf.

My New Year’s resolutions have gone adrift.

I began with great determination and marked quite a few drink-free days off my calendar earlier this year, though not enough.

I vowed to do 100 squats per day for a month. And I did.

I did the first month and I felt great. So, I did a second month and felt like a superwoman. It was all going fine until around the three-month mark when my knees and hips started grating like—I read a brilliant description somewhere on Facebook—like a goat chewing on an aluminium can—and the pain got steadily worse. For the last three months, I have been crawling around. I go from groin strain to a stiff neck, to pains in the arches of my feet. Is this what old age is like? I even took a Covid test the other day, just to rule that out. It was negative, of course.  So, it’s back to taking turmeric and ginger in large quantities.

I hate my body, but I find joy in other things. For example, my plants. They are so happy since I built them some proper vertical shelving and I’m so happy when I go out to greet them in the morning, or when I put them to bed at night. They smile at me, and they bloom and grow – well they grow. It is a shady garden so there is little blooming apart from my wonderful orchids, who delight in the shade. And I delight in being able to see them properly, as they are no longer lost somewhere underfoot in a swamp of Saharan dust.

I recently found a whole cache of pots and saucers in a skip and forced my poor son to accompany me to collect them in my old faithful pram. He was staying with me at the time on an extended visit, which I really enjoyed despite the pair of crinkled socks that took up residence on my toolbox at the bottom of the stairs for the duration of his stay.

There were several ‘nice’ pots and then there was one spectacular specimen. True, one side of the rim is sheared off, but it has a patina of age that one cannot buy, and I can easily turn the broken side to the wall. My banyan tree has gone into it, and she is taking off like a rocket—I can’t wait for her to start sending down her strangler roots. 

A spectacular specimen - banyan not too shabby either.

Another brilliant find was a blue and white glazed pot that was wedged inside a rather garish and peeling yellow planter. I had no idea it was there, so it was like discovering a lost treasure. I had to tap the planter gently to ease it out. It has birds and flowers drawn on it and it has a beautiful form, with a wide mouth and a narrow base. It is now home to a tall thin euphorbia I bought from a street seller.

A truly delightful pot!

I am a terrible skip trawler, and I realise that I am an embarrassment to my children, but there are such treasures to be had for nothing, except for the shame of wheeling them home in a baby’s pram, fleeced with dog hair. All this I write from my slightly broken, yet perfectly functional Läckö table, still held together with cable ties. One day it will bloom.

As I mentioned, my son was here and although I am not sociable and do not like going out—on my own at least—while he was here, we went out to a few places locally and made some great discoveries. It is one of the reasons I love living here, food is really good, and it is not expensive to eat out. My boy adores the seafood and he takes full advantage when he visits. I just tag along and learn something new about my city with every visitor.

It is nice to get out of the routine, although it always makes extra work for me afterwards. And it was nice to spend extra time with my son. Living in different countries, as we do, family life is not something we take for granted. We can’t do Sunday lunch together. We don’t even do Christmases together unless we end up in the same place by chance. I don’t demand that we do family holidays, largely because I don’t like doing them myself and, dare I say it, “I hate Christmas!” Yes, I am one of those bah-humbug people.

I am now laughing at myself for talking about Christmas in sweltering July! And it is hot! Summer came very early this year, with some sweltering heat in June. Now it seems to be cast in for July and August as well.

And suddenly, over the past few days, the tightness in my muscles has eased. Is it the turmeric or is it a virus that has passed? Who knows, but it occurred to me, while I was cleaning the silky leaves of my banyan tree, as she happily spreads her roots in her skip-treasure that I’m a bit broken too. I’d like to think that I am no less beautiful than when I was new and no less useful than when my body was fully functioning. I would hate to think of my children putting me in a plastic bag beside a skip, simply because I’d got a bit chipped along the way. I don’t think they will—they are not that sort of people. Besides I’m still working on my upper body strength to take up the slack and may one day look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Venus of Schwarzenegger.

Watch out TikTok—here I come!