A little of what you like often comes at a price

A little of what you like does you good, they say. Sometimes, doing yourself a little good also seems to involve what you don’t like much.

Pilates is a case in point. Danielle has persuaded me to join her there twice now. Two weeks in a row. But it takes a while to get the hang of it. Take the scoring system. I mean, how do you know when you’ve won?

Well, I’ve discovered now and, let me tell you, it’s perverse. You win in Pilates when your muscles really ache. When it hurts, preferably intensely, you’re doing it well.

You read that right. It’s a sport where it’s supposed to hurt and you do it for pleasure. Talk about organised masochism. What’s more, the worse it hurts, the more good it’s doing you.

To take another example, there’s heading off on holiday. Leaving grey wet England for somewhere that ought to be warmer and brighter. Without appointments and deadlines. In pursuit of pure relaxation. But that comes at a price: the stress of making sure that everything that needs doing is done before one puts the out-of-office message up and shuts down the laptop. A painful rush. It means that once you finally get to go on holiday, you really need one.

The worst of it was that there weren’t only work tasks to complete before departure. I had a responsible domestic job too: putting a new clasp for a padlock on the gate to the garden. This was principally needed because of Toffee. She mostly behaves quite well but provoked, say by the passage of a cat, she could be tempted to rush straight through an open gate and into the road, whether a car was bearing down on her or not.

Toffee (on the right) with her friend Luci
The picture of innocence. Until she gets into trouble (again)

It was brought home to me just how carefully she needs protecting when I was on a walk with her in one of our local parks the other day. She slipped through the railings around the lake, because she’s still small enough. When I saw what she’d done, I called her over, thinking that she’d go back out by the way she’d got in, and come around to me. After all, between her and me was a tongue of lake water, with a drop of a metre or more down to it. 

She surely wouldn’t come straight towards me, ignoring the deep drop into a drop of deep water? I had barely time to think the thought and notice that she was looking straight at me and ignoring the hazard in front of her, before she came trotting in my direction, all innocent obedience, and went straight off the edge and, with a plop, into the freezing water.

Fortunately, Luton Council in its wisdom and kindness had set a steel ladder in the wall on my side of the water. I was over the fence in a second and down the bottom of the ladder calling to her as she swam round and round, looking far from comfortable with her impromptu dip. She was a little confused, swimming towards me and then away – well, who can blame her? She’d just tried coming to my call and look where that had got her – but eventually she came close enough for me to grab her collar and pull her out and on to dry land.

A wet cold poodle on cold dry land.

With a dog like that, who wouldn’t be afraid to leave her with a garden – accessible through her dog flap – not properly sealed from the road?

The clasp had to go up. But that involved doing things with screws and screwdrivers. On a wooden gate full of knots. This is not a skill in which I particularly shine. I had trouble getting more than half the screws more than half the way in.

Even with a power drill, the screwdriver bits just spun on the screw heads, driving them in not one jot. Since the failure of this exercise couldn’t possibly be attributed to the workman, I had to blame the tools. Naturally. So I ordered a new set of screw bits for the drill.

Just wonderful. They arrived the following day. And by that afternoon the clasp had been mounted, thus proving that I had no trouble getting the job done once the proper tools had arrived.

Having the right tools is crucial for a good job
Though having an actual building worker around's even better

Coincidentally, a building worker was in the house that morning, finishing off the last job outstanding on the work we started in the autumn (what a relief: finally done). It’s true that he happened to have his own power drill and screwdriver bits. It’s equally true that he has some skill with driving screws into ancient wood made hard by its knots. But that’s not the point: the job needed doing and by the afternoon it had been done.

Surely that was the extent of my responsibility, wasn’t it?

I now feel I can dedicate myself to holiday mood, with a clear conscience.