THE trees are in their autumn beauty. The kids are back at school.
Long-sleeved T-shirts and knee-length boots can’t – surely – be far away. In the meantime the evening-class season has suddenly come upon us. I know this because I just got a text which announced, politely but firmly, that Newpark Nightschool is open for business by phone or by e-mail. “Looking forward to seeing you,” it concludes cheerily.
Well, quite. But what happened to the summer? A few short weeks ago, it seems like, we were saying farewell to evening classes. Long days and bright nights lay ahead like a golden promise. Now it’s dark by dinner-time. Scary.
For two years or more, Tuesday night has been tai chi night in my house, which means Tuesdays – at least during term-time – have taken on a whole tai-chi sort of shape. It requires a measure of organisation and self-discipline, this evening class carry-on. I mean, it’s not as if I’m aiming to be Mr Miyagi or anything. But you need to get the evening meal sorted in good time. And crucially you need to eat something which is reasonably filling, so your tummy won’t rumble – but not something which will make you sleepy – or worse, unsociable.
Steamed veggies, if you can bear them, are the business. Chips, beans, or any recipe involving eggs in any shape or form, are hopeless.
Then it’s on with the track bottoms and over to Newtownpark Avenue. As it’s the beginning of a new academic year there’ll be a new batch of people in attendance as well as – I trust – a number of familiar faces.
And familiar rituals. Every term, we look up at the soggy ceiling tiles and wonder aloud if there’s any news on the new school buildings which are rumoured to be in the pipeline at Newpark. So far there has been no news and, sadly, there’s unlikely to be any this term either.
In any case, I suspect that if we were to be beamed up to a glossy new tai chi room, we’d spend all our time fondly reminiscing about the old one: those tatty ceiling tiles; the row of unaccountably high windows which rattle and shudder on stormy nights; the door which has an impressive knack of opening all by itself, just when we’re standing like mountains or sending a smile all the way to our spleens or some such.
I’m smiling already, just thinking about it. The walk along the school corridors is also, often, smile-inducing because there’s always something new to look at: a selection of art on the walls; meetings and society notices; posters for Amnesty International or tolerance of gayness. The building may not be beautiful, but it hums with creativity, energy, and sometimes anarchy – shadows left in the air after the people who teach and study here during the day have gone home. They probably don’t even realise that we “adults” are smiling to ourselves as we arrive for our various evening classes – plumbing, sign language, ecological gardening – and imbibe it all.
Most people know tai chi from the scene in Calendar Girls, where Helen Mirren and Co do a bit of a brush-knee on the Yorkshire moors. I first encountered it in Sydney more than a decade ago. I was visiting my daughter, who lived in Ultimo – Sydney's Chinatown – at the time, and I liked to go to Tumbalong Park on Darling Harbour in the early mornings, before it got too hot, to sit on a park bench and read.
One day, out of the corner of my eye, I became aware of movement in the bushes. An alarming thing in Australia, frankly, since most movement in the bushes indicates the presence of some natural-born critter which aims to bite, sting or otherwise banjax you. But when I looked up, there was an elderly Chinese man in one of those old-fashioned blue Mao pyjama suits, doing a series of unhurried and apparently effortless movements.
Wow, was my instinctive reaction. I want to do that. But where would you start? Starting, it turned out, took many years. The Chinese like to say that that “when the pupil is ready, the teacher appears”. This was certainly the case for me because it took a lot of fiddling about with DVDs, starting, stopping, forgetting and fiddling about some more before I discovered the Tuesday evening class at Newpark.
Doing tai chi in a group is much better than doing it in the bushes, or even in your livingroom. Imagine it: a dozen people engaged in the same measured, gentle movements, with music playing softly in the background.
Nobody peeks at you to see if you’re dressed better, or going lower, than they are. You’re not pushing yourself, either, to stretch further or reach higher. You are, in effect, learning to listen to your body – which, for Westerners raised to believe that bodies are at best inadequate and at worst sinful and to be conquered rather than consulted, is not easy.
That’s why you need a good teacher. Enter Charles Thackaberry; humorous, patient and kind, dedicated to an almost lunatic degree, and far too modest to point out that he’s a tai chi master of the best sort.
We just get glimpses of it every now and again when, having spent the best part of an hour teaching us to do some baby step which we find almost impossible, he spins around
180 degrees without warning or kicks shoulder-high without visible effort.
We smile. Mr Miyagi, eh? We promise ourselves we’ll practise. We never do. But every week we come out of the class feeling much better than when we went in. And we’re making progress; slowly, but that’s okay.
I’m sure the plumbers and upholsterers feel the same. It’s the way school should be. Yes, Newpark Nightschool, I’m looking forward to seeing you too.