A Reallocation of Time
This past fortnight has been dominated by parish work. There are currently eight or nine repair and refurbishment projects running in parallel, each with its own contractors, quotations, invoices and small administrative tasks. The role is less “project manager” in the abstract and more a continual switching of contexts: emails to write, parishioners to meet, access to the church to arrange, meetings to schedule, and decisions to nudge into existence. The cumulative effect is that a significant portion of the day has now been devoted to these responsibilities.
Alongside this, I continue with daily guitar practice; about forty minutes seems to be the minimum required to absorb the fingerstyle material I am being set. After three months of steady effort, the experience is sobering: progress is real but feels marginal, and the horizon of competence recedes as one advances. This is the normal early-stage experience: the tutor, noting improvement, responds with escalation.
Something had to give. This morning, walking with Clare to the church to check on the electrician’s work, I decided that my gym membership at Wells Leisure Centre would be the casualty. In theory, I attend twice weekly for sessions of Tai Chi, Tai Chi sword, and Shotokan kata amounting to about twenty-five minutes. This week I managed no sessions.
I regret letting go of physical disciplines acquired over years and prone to rapid decay when neglected. But the marginal benefit, in purely health terms, seems limited. Daily life already provides a steady background of activity: domestic activity up and down stairs, frequent walks into town, and regular trips between home and church. At seventy-five, it seems reasonable to accept that some pursuits belong to an earlier phase, and to concentrate instead on what now carries a higher priority for me.
Cancelling the membership proved more laborious than the decision itself. The process, predictably, could not be completed by leisure centre staff and the website was opaque to the point of obstruction. In the end, it required the intervention of the centre’s senior manager to navigate the system. The matter is now settled: the final payment will be made on 1 April and my 'free' sessions will terminate at the end of April.
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