Four legs good : Two legs bad

For centuries children have played with kites; diamond-shaped, paper-covered frames with long tails, tossed into the air and flown ever higher at the tug of a string. Just one string. You couldn’t steer or direct such kites but they were inexpensive and great fun; kite-flying was, and is exhilarating.

It all changed in the 1970s, when an Englishman called Peter Powell replaced the single string with two strings and a kite became instantly controllable. It could be commanded to twist and turn; it would even skim across the hedge-tops horizontally, parallel to the ground. Amazingly, Powell was granted a patent for his invention, because in all the thousands of years that kites had been flown on fields and sea-shores around the world, nobody had ever come up with the idea of two strings. Today almost every kite you can buy in the toyshop has two strings and two little handles that make the kite totally controllable and so much more fun to fly.

There are many aspects of life in which two are better than one. Like walking sticks – or to be more precise, alpine stocks. The Alpenstock was as essential as the digital camera is today for every serious tourist back in the 19^th century, when intrepid Brits started to conquer the Swiss Alps, (that the locals had more or less ignored their entire lives, according to Zurich’s Museum of Tourism.) This was a sturdy walking stick with a spike for slippery surfaces and a shaft of seasoned ash onto which little medals could be nailed, commemorating the peaks and villages that the well-travelled tourist had conquered. And then, no more than a generation ago, one keen walker realised the advantages to speed and stability that would ensue if a person held something like Alpenstock in each hand. And hiking poles were born.

The point about walking in open country is that it’s partly about stamina and partly about balance. While one foot is in the air, the body is unstable because there is only one point of anchorage. Add a pair of hiking poles and there are always 3 feet on the ground. Which is why mountain goats don’t fall over. And similarly, with my German-engineered hiking poles, neither do I. As George Orwell says in Animal Farm: Four legs good : Two legs bad.

When we discussed exercise in my first consultation, the doctor had a wry smile on his face. “We want you to exercise and build up your muscles, but we don’t want you to put unnecessary strain on that worn hip-joint.” A bit of a Catch 22, really, and then he added: “It’s important that you walk on smooth paths and not on rocky roads, because if you are walking on uneven surfaces then you will be struggling to keep your balance and that will put additional strain on your hip.” But there are few smooth roads around here; it’s all farmland and forest.

My hiking poles lying on a typical farm track

With a smile and a flourish, I produced my hiking poles, which would both limit the strain on my hip joint and improve my ability to keep my balance on the rough roads.

But this has not been an immediate solution, as I had forgotten the doctor’s words at the outset, namely that with Ayurvedic treatments, the condition will worsen before it improves. One of this week’s newly arrived patients is giving up and going home, the treatments simply too severe and distressing for her to handle. That’s not wimpish cowardice; it’s a fact that the initial reactions are very difficult to handle. After a few days I found the stairs in the main building almost impossible to climb and was hauling myself up on the hand-rail. Some mornings my walk down the road was no more than a shuffle, handicapped by a sense of complete exhaustion.

It’s taken the best part of three weeks to get back to some semblance of myself in terms of mental and physical energy, but the price has been well worth paying, and yesterday my exercise was – in both senses – just “a stroll in the park.”

Now each morning and afternoon, I pull on my sandals, grab my hiking poles and stride out confidently and securely as I head through the forest to the amused shouts of a group of local children. What I interpret as cheerful friendly greetings are probably derisory cries of something like “Oy Mister!- where’s your skis?”

Tomorrow, a new course of treatment starts and continues for the next 5 days. You’d never guess....