My mum and I
had a packed schedule over the summer. First of all, we became members of
Woking leisure centre, attended the gym regularly once or twice a week plus
other classes. My mum badly needed exercising to strengthen the muscles of her
back hoping for some improvement with her pain. She suffers from back aches due
to a twisted spine that is getting worse because of aging. Sometimes even
walking is hell for her and she is worried she won’t be able to walk one day.
For this reason, she also attended massage and ago puncture sessions in therapy
centres and used the tens machine, which gave her a bit of relief. None of
these activities solved her problem but were helpful on the whole and are
probably contributing to avoid worse consequences.
She enjoyed
the gym, especially pedalling, and also the stretch and balance classes where
she could meet other elderly people. She didn’t like swimming or exercising in
the water as she has developed a sort of uneasiness to water. On my part, I
took the chance to start yoga classes again. Apart from a shocking first
encounter with acrobatic yoga (I booked the class by mistake without being
aware of what it was about, as there was no place left in the ‘normal’ yoga
class that day), I adapted well to intermediate yoga sessions I attend twice a
week with an excellent teacher. She is not only professionally topnotch and
very attentive to all her students, no matter what level, she also intermingles
her instructions with funny comments and hilarious explanations to make the
exercise more ‘visual’, in some way. Here are some examples:
‘kneel down
on one side and then the other as if you’re proposing to one person and then to
another one’
‘cross your
leg over as if you’re a dog looking for a tree to pee, but you haven’t found it
yet’
‘squat like
a bitch peeing, then turn your head and look to one side and to the other as if
seeing if someone is coming’
‘squat as if
peeing on a dirty toilet’
My mum also
attended the Italian club at the Maybury centre where she joins other Italian
ladies who play bingo and have a cup of tea and a piece of cake together. They
also sing old traditional Italian songs and have a good chat together. She met
them at the Italian mass as well and we went to the cinema to see Mamma mia, here we go again and Invincible 2 with her best friend. Though
my mum doesn’t understand or speak English, she read the story of the films in
Italian beforehand and managed to follow the shows pretty well. I love Abba
songs so Mamma Mia 2 was just heaven
for me. The cast were so exceptional that you could pardon the foregone (and rather improbable)
happy ending where all couples magically and forcibly match. I was only a bit
puzzled by the absence of the real ‘mother figure’ at the end of the story. I
mean the Greek lady who helped Donna to get through her troubles, have the baby
and set up the hotel. She was present in Donna’s life and helped her to fulfil
her dreams. But the lady disappears at the end. Maybe there is no place
for people like her in Hollywood fairy tales. Instead, Donna’s biological
mother, Sophie’s grandmother, comes out (nothing to say about Cher’s wonderful
performance, though she was rather stiff on stage, maybe due to the tight
costume and high heels). She is the one who ignored Donna when she was a girl,
didn’t even turn up at her graduation and banished her when she was pregnant (Mamma mia 1). She is a sort of redeemed
bad witch; perhaps they meant to stress the power of forgiveness, mandatory
when you deal with successful rich people.
I loved Invincible 2 as well, I found it as
incredibly good as the first one. I especially liked the new leading role
assigned to the wife and the unpredictable transformations and multi-power
characteristics of the youngest child of the couple. What I found a bit foregone (again) was the
necessity of having an evil figure, a villain in flesh and blood, so to say,
eventually. In this case I thought the most natural ending would’ve been
to have a sort of hidden or displaced and undefinable power that disturbingly
controls people. But the movie was meant for children.
Mum and I
managed to go the the New Victoria theatre as well, an easy place to reach as
you can park in the shopping centre car park and go up with the lift. We went
to see Evita and War Horse two superb performances my mum could enjoy completely in
spite of her lack of English. Just putting on a nice dress, going out and
having good fun made her happy. We loved the wonderful music, the songs
beautifully sung and the impressive choreographies. We were flabbergasted by
the horse puppets, so well made and skilfully moved by the puppeteers to the
point of conveying the horses’ ‘feelings’.
During the
summer we were also busy making things. My mum made me some dresses and skirts
from patterns dating back to the 1970s I found at charity shops for 50p. she
always says she is not a professional seamstress, which is true, but she is so
precise in her work that the final product looks almost perfect. We went mad
about Frida Kahlo, influenced by the outstanding exhibition at the V&A, and
bought some fabric online. I even decorated a twig heart inspired by her
colours and style. Some of the materials my mum used were lucky pics from sales
and charity shops I bought for a few pounds, they really fuelled our creativity
and kept my mum busy.
The other
unmissable thing we did together was cooking, of course. We prepared delicious
dishes planning menus in advance, using old and new recipes and relying on my
mum’s undeniable cooking expertise, an art shared by most Italian mothers. We
made home made ravioli, fettuccine and lasagne; we prepared rice with nettles,
caponata, pasta alla norma, tomatoes stuffed with rice, black rice with prawns
and various cakes from old and new recipes. This not only occupied our days in
an agreeable and definitely useful way, but also encouraged my mum to have a
proper meal, as she often has no appetite lately.
Here are
some links to recipes I posted in the past:
new recipes
my mum and I experimented during the summer will follow on this blog.
