It's finished! Here's what it looks like now.
As you can see, we've retained the death-drop, fenceless-edge design feature from our old house; partly for the fresh, clean aesthetic, and partly to keep our guests on their toes. We don't want people getting too complacent while they are sipping cocktails on the terrace, do we? Anyway, it's only a couple of feet drop onto grass now, so you'd probably get away with non-life-threatening injuries, especially if you'd already sipped your way through a few cocktails before making your ill fated step backwards into the void. At the old house we had a five foot drop onto masonry, and still managed to avoid any fatalities.
Of course, when I say it's finished, I just mean we've sent the builders away with a cheery farewell and a big pile of money. There is still the painting of the retaining wall (which apparently we decided to do ourselves, although bearing in mind previous posts about painting, I must have sipped a good few cocktails before I agreed to it) and a considerable amount of garden recovery work to be done. The lovely Jackie, ever practical, and also observant of the fact that all my jobs outstanding after the extension was "finished" are still awaiting completion, has a plan, which involves employing a gardener. And, I suspect, yet more capital outlay. Oh well. At least gold is on a tear (at least in Sterling, whose value continues to plummet). It just reached its highest ever price of £40,000 per kilo, which is good news if you have some.
So much for the patio - or possibly terrace. I prefer the word terrace, and since it actually is one, I think I'll call it that. I also prefer to call our utility room the scullery, as a nod to the Victorian house which was my family's home for 50 years or so. One day I hope to have a duggery to go with it.
But what of the "exercises" in the title of this post? Ah, well, it's like this. The lovely Jackie talked my into signing up for the gym (in the forlorn hope that we would encourage each other into doing more gym-type stuff, and, I suppose, to ward off the effects of too much cocktail sipping on the terrace). I went along with this because the gym has a yoga class which I quite like. Part of the deal when signing up is that you get a free session with a personal trainer (or PT, in gym lingo), in a flagrantly transparent attempt to hook you into some proper ongoing costs. I didn't really follow this up for a long while, until I fell into conversation with a PT called Will, who won me over with his enthusiasm for yoga and functional strength training, and also his hugely positive reaction when I told him my goal is to able to do a front flip. Preferably with complete confidence on concrete, but I'll settle for grass if necessary. Anyway, the result of all this is that I took the free session with Will, he completely won me over again, and I signed up for ten more. So it's all about glutes, IT bands, lacrosse balls and balancing the body now. But mostly glutes, in my case. And I am re-learning how to jump, since I seem to have forgotten that somewhere along the way. It seems a lot harder than I remember it being when I was 10 or 12, anyway.
Will played rugby for Exeter when he was 17, is madly into surfing, and has a sister who is a house DJ called Miss Foster. She plays all round the world and is currently killing it in Bangkok (according to Soundcloud, anyway). All pretty groovy stuff. I feel enlivened. Right up until I try to do those crazy lunges with a forward bit at the end. Then, obviously, I feel deadened. It is working though; I am definitely stronger than I was - which isn't saying much, but it's a start.
Speaking of surfing, we just spent a weekend at Polzeath with our bodyboards. That's pretty good exercise, just standing in the shallows and wading around in the waves. And although I found it very frustrating (because I am really crap at it, and catch about one wave out of every twenty excellent ones) it does have a similar addictive quality to windsurfing. The main difference is that in surfing you have to do all the work yourself, which frankly seems a bit harsh, in this day and age. Unless you get to be skimboard World Champion, in which case you can simply run to the shore, fling a tiny, thin bit of fibreglass at the sea, jump onto it, pump it along by jumping up and down until you catch the wave, and then surf back inland. All without getting noticeably wet. If you think this sounds a bit far fetched, check out this video at 8:15, and watch the guy in the black wetsuit. He's Blair Conklin, and he's been doing this since he was four. Oh, and by the way it only really works at the Wedge in California, although I dare say he could still show us a thing or two down at Polzeath, if he chose to visit.
In other news, the table is undergoing another transformation, and getting its folding leaves covered in laminate. Unbelievably, there will also be yet another as yet untested type of paint involved. More of this later (I bet you can't wait!). But right now, I have to prepare my mind and body for another session with Will tomorrow. Or perhaps I'll just do a bit of sipping on the terrace...