Timing

Was the time right?

After years of prevarication and distraction, was it time to put her body through hell?

Muriel sat and took another bite out of her limp sandwich, the token piece of healthy rocket hanging over the edge of the crust, and balanced the book alongside her plate. The book was easy to read, easy to follow and made it all sound so easy. It had sat for a couple of weeks on the bookshelf, sandwiched between Susan Jeffers and Julia Cameron, hidden where she knew no one would bother to look at it.

It felt like a she was about to embark on climbing Everest without an oxygen mask. And in trainers. She would frequently daydream back to the days, when cycling 8 miles home from the office had been a downhill free pedal, or further back when the stand on your pedals, thigh muscle torture of hills had made her burn with pleasure or running several kilometres had been a meditation on repetition. Or the pleasure of feeling every muscle in her body ache from 50 lengths of the pool had made her collapse into bed with physical exhaustion.

But now.

Now was just.

Just now.

Childbirth, alcohol, prozac, closely followed by divorce and a life on benefits were displayed on her hips for all to see and judge her by. Unable to reach those peaks of physical activity, Muriel sought solace where she could find it. Between the pages of a vast library of subjects, art, philosophy, identity, personal development, cookery, paganism, christianity and exercise. Bloody exercise that over the years had become her nemesis. From her sofa she could read about all the subjects and interests she loved. However, this did not transform into actually doing and the longer she digested these tomes on life, the less she actually lived it.

She had however, lived the life of the dieter, from weight watchers to slimming world, from amphetamines to bulimia and regrettably none of these winning the competition for her sylph like form and her head remained crownless, leaving her stand on the nhs spotlight of 'obese, increased likelihood of heart disease'.

She didn't want the narrative of her life to read like a Hattie Jacques biography, with descriptions of voluptuousness and larger the lifeness. She wanted a Trinity or Lisbeth Salander description and the realisation that reading these descriptions was not going to metamorphosise these lean muscular figures off the page and into her reality (Baudrillard would've been proud).

Reading and consuming would not make her reality that different. She had to take her trainers firmly by the laces and assert some authority over them. She had to live.

The book (still reading between the lines) insisted she went for an actual walk. Encouraging words of inspiration assured her it was the place to start, the dog raised its eyes in hopeful agreement.

'I suppose,' Muriel mused at the depressed dog, 'a good place to start would be with getting dressed...'

Muriels Swim

As Muriel marched purposefully forward, she started to strip.

Off went the respectable M&S blouse that chained her to her semi detached life, off went the smart but casual shoes that were suitable for all types of wear, She took a deep breath in and undid the top button of her man made fibre trousers (climate friendly, wash at less than 30) and breathed out a huge lungful of air. She paused as her flabby belly sagged with relief at being released from its eight hours of torturous captivity that a freedom fighter would have been proud to have been martyred for. Wriggling her legs, they stepped free of their dual dictators and continued on their mission.

“Mum! Please don't, Please! Just Stop!” a plaintive cry from behind her barely penetrated her conscious as she reached both arms up her back to undo the strap of her 42F Bra.

“Ohmygodshesgonnastriptotally!” did reach her, but she chose to ignore the rising hysteria in her teenage sons voice.

Footsteps on the sand behind her indicated that Clive had bothered to lift his head up from the Sunday Telegraph, noticing that his wife was naked down to her pants on the seafront and central to a slowly growing audience on the promenade. The only sounds of support were from two middle aged ladies, whooping and cheering, clapping Muriel on, as if she needed encouragement.

“Muriel? Dear..?” Clives whiny voice tailed off as Muriel cast off the final restraints of her pants shaped marriage, discarding her ambivalent husband and her spoilt children.

A few more steps and she was ankle deep in the sea. The cold numbed her feet immediately and she took a sharp intake of breath as the change in temperature shocked her system. Slowly her feet began to tingle and she waded deeper, the sea slowing her progress but not her intent.

When the water was coldly circling her what would have been her waist, but was more akin to a buoyancy aid, She plunged naked in the cool straits.

The appreciation of the audience was carried out across the water as she took her first unsteady strokes in 40 years. The waves lifted her 55 year old tired and overweight body and welcomed her home as though time had stood still and stopped on her fifteenth birthday.

Her heart soared with liberation and ecstasy, it joined the seagulls cawing and playing on the thermals, experimented on a particularly uplifting thermal and gained height before diving back down to scoop her up into the beak of freedom. Muriel dived into the salty water leaving her human skin floating like a deflated rubber dinghy surrounded by the fronds of her bladderwrack hair. Her new streamlined body curved through the silky currents hidden under the waves, and as the tide turned, she flicked her tail of freedom, no longer constrained by the net of social compliance.