Van Gogh belongs in TK Maxx

Also this week: listening to music like a teenager, and my mortarboard vs the menopause

Photo by VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images

I bought two massive, cheap clocks in TK Maxx last week. About £12.99 each. They are huge, round and have those plastic fake brass frames. One of the faces has Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night on it and the other, Claude Monet’s Giverny Garden. I contemplated, for about ten seconds, the ethics of buying them. Did I now have to boycott TK Maxx as well? Kick off to the security guards about the commodification of dead artists’ work? Be outraged that these great artists’ work has ended up on a shelf in a discount store next to a painting of a cat in a tuxedo and a sexist doormat that reads “Please hide all parcels from my husband”?

Van Gogh painted Starry Night in 1889 during his stay at the asylum of Saint Paul de Mausole, in the throes of a deep depression. And now a copy of it is on my bedroom wall, with numbers 1-12 on it. I think of Van Gogh as I fall asleep and as I wake, that he died having sold only one painting. A morning pep talk in a discounted clock. Art does not just belong in galleries and rich people’s houses. It also belongs in TK Maxx. And all of our houses.

I’m not a big traveller, but in the last few weeks I’ve been both to Estonia and Germany, both for just 24 hours, and both to see one of my favourite bands, Swans. A Swans gig is an absolute onslaught of the senses and emotions. Uplifting, devastating, beautiful, hypnotic, brutal, spiritual, profound and very, very loud. I believe Swans to be the greatest live band on the planet, and I am grateful to my son for introducing me to them. When you’re a teenager, music can feel all-encompassing, even life-changing. It gives you an identity. Favourite bands can feel like friends, their lyrics written just for us. But as we get older, and life gets in the way, music can lose a bit of that significance. I’m thankful that, at 54, I’ve found a passion and excitement for it again.

Always on the run

I’ve been a runner all my life. It was never about “getting my steps in”, losing weight or evading the law – not these days anyway, not now that the police can just use drones to catch you (lazy). It always felt very instinctual. As a child I would bolt, like a greyhound out of a starting box, the moment I saw an open space, be it a field, a sports hall, or a runway. I loved being timed to fetch things. God, I’m not a dog, am I? But it wasn’t just the physical act of repeatedly moving my arms and legs in the same way that I loved, of being aware of my heart rate and my lungs acclimatising, of persevering through the tough bit before settling into a steady, manageable pace. There was always something else going on. I wouldn’t say spiritual exactly, but a kind of physical nostalgia.

Whether we like it or not, we’re evolutionary and biologically wired to desire walking and running. We needed to in order to adapt and survive. I challenge anyone not to feel a sense of euphoria walking or running along the ancient Ridgeway, Britain’s oldest road, a trail our ancestors have followed for over 5,000 years, past Neolithic, Iron Age and Bronze Age sites.

A life of leisure

Such a shame I had to stop running due to Achilles tendonitis. But like my sprinting ancestors, I adapted to survive and rejoined my local leisure centre, where I sign up for a variety of low-impact classes. I do them all. Spin, yoga, pilates, power pump, core conditioning. I love how it doesn’t matter what you wear, what you look like or how old you are. I love the fitness instructors’ zest and positivity. I love their playlists. I love toddlers watching us do our warm-ups through the café window laughing and trying to copy us. After many years away, I was sucker-punched by melancholy and nostalgia the day I rejoined, as I watched new parents take their children swimming – and memories of my own babies in the pool came flooding back. But that soon passed as I tried the café’s delicious banana bread and didn’t have to share it.

Hats off to graduates

Last week I had the privilege to have been awarded an honorary doctorate of arts by the University of Gloucester, my home town. It was held at the Centaur at Cheltenham Racecourse and was a very humbling experience, especially when I waved back at someone in the audience I thought had shouted that they loved me, only to realise it was all for my fellow honorary doctorate recipient, the legendary Tweedy the Clown. It was a great day. They decked me out in an exquisitely made beautiful, colourful robe. I didn’t wear the hat because I was boiling hot from the menopause. My presentation was at the end and I found it incredibly profound and moving. I was struck by the graduates’ individuality and uniqueness and was envious of them starting this new chapter of their lives, full of hopes and dreams. I didn’t go to university myself, so it was especially sweet to have been awarded something I didn’t have to do any work for.