7 May 2025

I’m doing what I should have done all along: recuperating

I am struck by how ill-designed bodies seem to be: miraculous in so many ways, but so beset with flaws.

I’ve been a bit cooped up at home this week with a bad back, and it’s all my own fault. I’d recovered well from the slight injury I suffered just before our gigs at the start of April, and so over the Easter weekend I decided to have a spring-cleaning blitz on the upstairs landing. Yes, I know, I know – moving heavy furniture, and then hoovering in a ridiculous position, and arching my back to reach up into high corners – all extremely bad news for someone with a vulnerable back. And yet somehow in my enthusiasm I forgot.

After a couple of days of this exertion Ben and I decided to go to the cinema, to see the new John and Yoko documentary One to One,co-directed by Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards. We paid extra for luxury seats at the Odeon, expecting, well, luxury. I can honestly say I have never sat in a more uncomfortable seat, both too squishy to offer any support, and too long for my feet to touch the ground. I spent two hours braced upright, with Ben’s jacket wedged behind me to keep me from slumping. For the final ten minutes we stood at the back of the auditorium, and I realised I had probably made a terrible mistake.

Anyway, now here I am, paying for it all and doing what I should have been doing all along: resting and recuperating. I have been Googling advice for my particular back issue, and it turns out that at least two of the stretches I thought were helpful are top of the forbidden list, so I have stopped doing them. Every website tells me to avoid too much sitting down and also too much standing up. I wonder whether I can learn to hover in mid-air.

I decide to spend some time lying on my back with my knees bent on the yoga mat. That feels quite good, and reminds me of my old Alexander Technique lessons for improving posture. But it gets boring after a while, so I pick up my phone and hold it up above my face in order to scroll through Instagram as I lie there. Scrolling proves tricky though, and I drop the phone, which lands corner first, and hard, in my eye socket. Ben is out so I pick myself up off the mat, swearing enthusiastically, find an ice pack in the freezer and apply that to my new shiner.

Once again I am struck by how ill-designed bodies seem to be. Miraculous in so many ways, but so beset with flaws, none of which improve as the basic machinery ages. During my online searches for help I learn that I am sitting on the wrong kind of sofa, so I move. I look at pages of special seat wedges. I read about lumbar-support cushions. Dear God, I start thinking about a Parker Knoll wing back chair, and then I close my laptop before I lose the will to live.

Instead I pick up Kate Mossman’s book, Men of a Certain Age, in which she writes about and interviews ageing male rockers. The book is at least partly about herself, and early on she writes about her solo trips across the US on Greyhound buses. “I enjoyed the alienation. As a road-walker, or a bus-rider, you’re immediately one of the castaways yourself, and I loved that feeling – loved the danger of some of the situations I put myself in.” From my safe armchair, I’m gripped, and I know I’m going to enjoy this book.

Before that I’d been reading Ian Leslie’s John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, about Lennon and McCartney. Music aside, what shone through the book for me was the sheer strangeness of both John and Paul as people. They really were singular. Not just because of their musical talents, but because of their complex personalities – each of them a mixture of concealed pain, surface humour, arrogance, intelligence, superhuman levels of drive, and obsessiveness. You can see what they saw in each other, and it’s very compelling. As I finished the book, I realised I missed being in their dazzling company.