Yoga and Other Adventures

Sometimes, yoga can get you into some strange positions.

Which is how I ended up in a minicab in Camden at 5:25 am on Saturday morning with a man in a trilby hat I'd met about five minutes beforehand.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

For a newspaper article I'm writing, I needed to go to a yoga class that starts at 5:30 am Saturdays in Camden. Yes, you're reading right – 5:30 am. I'd missed it the week before thanks to a little too much vino at wine bingo, and I couldn't miss it this week because my article deadline is Friday.

So last Friday, I met some friends to audition birthday cocktails (friend's birthday, not mine – thanks to a variety of circumstances mine is shaping up to be the lamest, saddest one on record). Despite best of intentions to go to sleep early, I ended up awake well past midnight, trying to sort out some urgent details about my US trip (another mess I'll skip the whinge about for now).

Thanks to crappy transport links between northeast and northwest London, I figured I'd have to wake up about as early – 4 am -- whether I took a couple of buses or walked. So of course I chose to walk. Except both walkit.com and Google tend to forget things like that one cannot (and even if one could, one wouldn't want to) walk through Her Majesty's Prisons, in this case Pentonville. Cue much shuffling with the A to Z, which luckily I'd thought to bring.

Except I'd estimated the walk would take about 50 minutes and had left an hour for it. At about 5:20 am I was getting anxious.

The only person on the street was a man in geek glasses and a trilby – a fashion type if ever I've seen one, not an axe murderer.

"About how far am I from Chalk Farm Road?" I asked.

"About 15 minutes' walk," he answered. "I'm going that way – I'll show you."

He started to walk quite slowly. He'd just left a shop where – in contravention of every liquor law I know – he'd managed to buy a bottle of Captain Morgan's spiced rum. I tried to work out how drunk he was.

"Sorry, I'm kind of late so I think I might just have to run there. Is it this way?" I asked, pointing.

"I'm feeling kind of lazy – I might just get a cab. I'll take you there," he said.

I hesitated. Getting into a minicab with a perfect stranger breaks about every rule in the book, but after five years running around Europe, the Middle East and Africa for work, I think I've got a pretty decent danger-o-meter. Plus, I have certainly done worse (cue bribing Sri Lankan villagers to let me onto their roofs in an attempt to pick up a satellite, bartering of tampons with a certain celebrity publicist who happened to be wearing white trousers, etc etc) in my desperation to get the story.

Jasper, as I learned his name was, was an actor/photographer/self-described "local celebrity." (The last bit is how he's allowed to buy alcohol at 5:15 am, he explained.) He'd been having a party to celebrate his birthday and ducked out for a bit of peace and quiet – and to buy more booze. He directed the cab driver to his flat, hopped out, paid the £6 that would cover his fare and mine, and told me to ring him sometime.

I struggled to find the yoga centre – it was one of those infuriating addresses without a number, only a street name. Finally I found it, in Camden Stables, and raced up the stairs, taking a couple of wrong turns.

Outside the room where I guessed the yoga was (the front desk was unmanned), there was a woman dressed all in white, her hair covered with a white cap. I remembered vaguely reading something about how students were invited to wear white, something I'd promptly forgotten about until right about that minute. (Not that it would have mattered – I don't own white gym kit.)

She handed me a mat and took one for herself.

"Well done for getting here. I think I can make a space next to me – it's absolutely rammed in there."

Rammed? At 5:30 am? For an hour of yoga and an hour of chanting? Who knew London was so full of nutters?

Turns out the space next to her was right next to the teacher. And I was the only person in the room not all in white, with my hair covered. At another time in my life, I might have freaked out. Instead I just tried not to laugh. I wanted a story, I was getting a story. End of story.

(How was the yoga, you ask? It wasn't too bad. It was Kundalini, which I've never tried before – apparently there are hundreds of sequences but this particular one didn't have a down dog in sight. Instead there were about a bajillion double leg lifts where the teacher would say things like "Activate your magnetic centre." I don't know about my magnetic centre, but my abs definitely were firing.)

***

So Monday I hit 30 days with no bingeing.

In the interest of honesty I should admit I struggled with whether to call Saturday night a binge and reset the counter. After dinner and far too much cava sangria, I decided to eat a very small Rococo chocolate bar (100 calories), 2 small Rococo chocolates, and 3 chocolate covered espresso beans. In the scheme of my binges this is practically celery sticks and carrots, but what bothered me was the "sneaking" behaviour – I didn't eat them publicly.

Still, considering that I had a lot of other food in my bag (I was staying at a friend's and going to Pilates early, plus I'm trying to use up the snacks I have in my flat instead of buying more) and didn't just tear through it all, I think it's sort of a draw. Anyway, Peridot deemed it greedy but not a PacMan-like binge, and I allowed myself to be convinced!

Unfortunately, 30 days of clean eating (and it really was very clean, except for Saturday night) has not done much to budge the Dorset pounds. I still have somewhere between six and eight to go, depending on how (un)friendly the scale is being. And I fear those extra pounds may find themselves a few extra friends after what's shaping up to be a stressful, all-over-the-place, serious-lack-of-personal-space-and-time trip to the US...