Bull.

One night last week, we got the babysitter in and ventured into town to go to the theatre:

Up in the cheap seats at the Theatre Royal (Australia's oldest, no less), where the chandelier is almost at eye level, you wouldn't want to suffer from vertigo as it is dizzyingly high. We went to see The Select (The Sun Also Rises) by an experimental New York theatre company brought to Hobart as part of Tasmania's International Arts Festival, Ten Days On the Island. Amazingly, a sizeable chunk of the dialogue was lifted directly from the pages of Hemingway's novel Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises  which was narrated predominantly by the main character and acted by the cast.  A play within the pages of the novel was revealed and it was long, almost three and a half hours....if you were a fast reader you could a almost read the book to yourself in that time (I read in on the two planes between Hobart and Brisbane). The production was witty and clever, which managed to save it from being a tad on the dull side, and used a pastiche of words, music, sound effects and....trestle tables, which did duty as.....trestle tables, beds, trout and most dramatically.....a bull:

Yes, a bull, because you need a bull/trestle table for a bullfight. And there was a bullfight, just before the promiscuous Lady Brett Ashley ran off with the bullfighter, having shagged most of the other male characters, except for Jake....because he was impotent due to wounds sustained in WW1. Hemingway, of course, loved bullfights.....after he committed suicide in 1961, two tickets to the upcoming Pamploma bullfights were discovered in his desk.

I can't say that I share his appreciation, as I don't like bullfights. All of that testosterone dressed up in pink tights and gilded, garishly hued, tight costumes......the absurd stances, pelvic thrusts and floppy hair. Not to mention the overwhelming barbarity and the blood and guts.

I went to a bullfight at the arena in Beziers in 2010....coincidentally, it was just around the corner from the hospital where I had my baby four months later. My overriding impression, from what I saw through my tears, was a cruel attention seeking display of virility. The odds are stacked against the bull from the minute that it runs, confused and scared into the arena. It is never going to get out of there alive. It is going to be taunted and formulaically stabbed, until it can barely hold it's head up and then some egotistical maniac is going to utterly humiliate it and kill it in an attempt to show off. Don't be fooled...it is nothing like the children's classic storybook The Story of Ferdinand.

Occasionally, a bullfighter gets gored:

.....good on the bull I say.

Peversely, outside the arena before the corrida, it was almost how I imagine going to a Tom Jones concert would be like.....lots of giggly, excited women....young and old, clutching flowers, cards and notes to throw at the bullfighters feet as an act of infatuation. If the judges want to show their approval, they don't present a trophy and fizz up the champagne...they award one or two of the beasts severed ears and if they think it was particularly good, it's tail.

Bullfighting in the Langudoc area of South West France continues to grow in popularity...in may have been outlawed by an act of parliament over the border in Spain's Catalonia, yet in France it attracts a massive crowd and various towns have a week long hard sangria drinking, paella eating, bullfighting focused Feria associated with it.

In just over three weeks we are heading back to the Languedoc. The closest sizeable town to the village where we will be living and our children going to school, is Nimes, which boasts several important remains from the ancient Roman Empire including an amphitheatre which was built around 70AD. In the late 19th century it was remodelled as........a bullring, which is still in use today. Needless to say, I won't be going there to see a bullfight however I am tempted to maybe get tickets to see Depeche Mode perform there in July.

Rx

Addicted.

I knew better yet I just couldn't resist. While packing school lunches this morning I ate the merest sliver of baked chocolate cheesecake even though I knew I was going to a 9.30am Bikram Yoga Class. Big mistake. By Standing Head to Knee Pose I felt the full consequences - faint, nauseous and tingly in my extremities all at one. It is a bad, bad feeling.

So now I have declared a moratorium on doing our tax until after the school holidays which start this afternoon. I'm not going to kid myself - four children and time to do tax...it's never going to happen. Sometimes I think about back in the day when I used to manage the Trust Account for our business, how did I ever do that? I've never been gifted at maths  - l'll fess up that I did veggie maths at school. Then I  console myself that I did manage to get a First Class Honours Degree........the problem being that it is in Art Theory.

Anyway I digress. I have been musing about addiction and what I might admit to being addicted to. This is what gives me heart palpitations and sweaty palms if I go cold turkey. You are welcome to either laugh or cry.

1. Green Tea:

To be honest, most days I knock back five or even six cups. I know this is too much because if I don't drink it, I get a headache. Don't be put off by my teacup, it is a 'breakfast cup' and has the dimensions of a bucket. Actually, I used to like coffee (a good old Australian flat white). Actually, that would be an understatement. We took an espresso machine to hospital when I had Mimi. And then three years ago an old school friend and I went and had a week at The Golden Door in the Hunter Valley. There was a time when we would have roared with laughter if someone from the future had told us that we would move heaven and earth to have our families looked after so that we could detox, diet and exercise our heads off. We used to be a tad hedonistic when we got together (she has lived in Melbourne, London and Launceston to my Sydney, South of France and Hobart). So, for a whole week, we gave up caffeine, alcohol and red meat and got up every morning in time to do tai chi while the sun rose. For about six months I drank no caffeine and then it started sneaking in in the guise of green tea. Alcohol, unfortunately was another story, I'm ashamed to admit that we broke out the bubbly on the flight home from the Golden Door, much to our fellow inmates glee!

2. Bikram Yoga:

I try and go to Bikram Yoga classes at Studio Newtown at least five times a week. Otherwise, I get the above listed withdrawal symptoms. I have been a convert since my first class in Hobart three years ago. As it is an international phenomenon, I have been to Bikram Yoga classes in Hobart, Sydney, Bali and I tried to go in Paris yet was turned away as it was only five weeks since my fourth caesarian. I tried. I have also been to garden variety yoga classes in Bali, in the gorgeous gardens at the Ayana and overlooking the ocean at the Karma Kandara and in India, on the roof of the Lake Palace and on a hilltop at the Devi Garh. Not last year, but the year before, when I was pregnant and living in the South of France, I used to lug myself into the cobbled streets of Beziers at least twice a week to go to classes at the Yoga Centre. It was a world away from extreme, sweaty, scantily clad Bikram Yoga (which was three hours away in Marseilles). Genevieve must have been in her sixties yet looked twenty years younger. In class, her hair was always 'coiffed' and she wore full 'macquillage' and colour matched her toenail polish with her yoga outfit - her fingernails were always an immaculate French polish. Are there any other Bikram Yoga practitioners out there reading this reading this to appreciate the humour?! I learnt the French words for every body part along with stock standard yoga poses - Chien qui Tombe, anyone?


Earlier this year I did a week long seminar with Bikram Choudhury himself. You can read all about it in graphic detail here, here, here, here and here. Say what you will about him but he really is a walking advert for the yoga that he sells - can you believe that he's over seventy (that's him in the middle of the picture in the speedos with his hair in a bun)? I think I'd rather have yoga than botox any day.

Bikram Yoga is a ninety minute open eye meditation where you also get to work your body inside and out. As extreme as it sometimes seems, in class, I have NEVER seen anybody come to any physical  harm. At my last Body Pump class at a gym in town, they had to get an ambulance for someone who was having a heart attack.

3. Gowans Auctions:

Thursday is viewing day. Yesterday, I had to fight every fibre of my being to stop myself heading out to Main Road, Moonah to check out what was on offer - maybe this week that unknown 'thing' that I didn't realise that I couldn't live without just might be there. My reaction caused me to investigate the whole addiction question. Let me tell you, in my life, on Thursdays all roads lead to Moonah, either by car or, I have even been known to rollerblade from the Cenotaph along the Cycleway, which conveniently runs just behind the auction sheds.....with a double pram. Last Thursday, I mistakenly took the children and bought a Wendy House. It maxed out the credit card. It has to be the ultimate way to go shopping, the stock changes every week and then there is the rush involved in trying to choose the price. Unfortunately you can't always call it cheap thrills as it can be ruinously expensive....and everything in between. Last week you could have bought the entire six volume set of Gibbon's 'The History of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' or a brand new, stainless steel, freestanding Smeg cooker, if you were so inclined. I bought the Wendy House:

Note to self, remember NOT to take the children out to Gowans. However, I might just have a quick look at the catalogue for what's up in next week's auction.....online.

R