Late Victorian Exercise, the Viktoriapark, Etc.

Earlier today, as part of the Edwardian experiment, I went through an exercise routine that early bodybuilder Eugen Sandow published in 1894. For ladies, he suggests 4 pound weights in one of his later books, but after rummaging around the pantry, I used two 1-kilo bags of sugar instead. His expectations of women's fitness don't seem high by contemporary standards: the first round was pretty easy - except the 10 push-ups with resistance bands, which even without resistance bands rather defeated me because I didn't modify by doing them on my knees. And ladies were exempted from the squat exercise. (Also, I cheered internally when he described sit-ups where one wedges one's feet beneath a weight or piece of furniture; since I'm terrible at these, it's my favourite 'technique.') But of course I could increase the weights, and he has planned out how ladies can increase repetitions over time.

I didn't do this in the Saturday time slot that is usually devoted to all things time-travelling, because it required reading an e-book.

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Yesterday I went to the market hall in Kreuzberg again. It had a ghostlier air about it than ever, probably due to the coronavirus and due to the uncertain weather with the promise of rain and wind to come.

The leafy trees, the blue sky and fluffy clouds and sunshine, and the dandelions (the seedheads already white amongst the lush green grasses and the remaining yellow flowers), however, were quite beautiful. Visitors to the Viktoriapark were photographing the pink tree flower petals that were floating on the dark pools, the waterways were rushing along their landscaped channels — some with coppery-orange beds that showed up brightly against the darker rock, and cottonwood fluff lay in snowy drifts in the grass and tumbled along the path in free-form pillows at one point. The lilacs were blossoming, scentless at midday — the hawthorn trees too... but I felt the scene was uncannily empty.

Earlier, we had our breakfast in which I'd copied an Edwardian menu —

Coffee

Tea

Hot and cold milk

Bread

Toast

Butter

Boiled eggs

Cold ham

Sardine toast

Strawberries or other fresh seasonal fruit

I had done calf raise exercises for 5 minutes while waiting for the food to finish. But I admittedly fudged them after the first minute and a half. This exercising was recommended in an early 1900s ladies' magazine issue, which failed to specify if there should be sets of repetitions with breaks in between or just 5 straight minutes of rising on one's tippy-toes. Either way, to me it seemed like a quick way to get bad muscle cramps, the kind of exercise that leaves you incapable of any other exercise. But although I did feel it today, it wasn't as bad as I'd feared - maybe because I had fudged it.

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For dinner the menu was Irish-influenced. I baked dark soda bread from a mixture of whole grain and plain flour, Ge. brewed black tea to drink with it, and I boiled cauliflower with carrots, made 'champ' from mashed potatoes and milk and green onion, and cut up fennel bulb and made a vinaigrette for a salad. Of course I regretted not tracking down a few bottles of Guinness beer.

Teatime was similar to all the other teatimes we've had the past few weeks: Scones, blueberries, lemon curd, whipped cream, and nettle-and-fennel tea. This time I added brown sugar cookies that I'd made earlier in the week and saved up for Saturday in a cookie tin.

Supper I didn't get around to at all — and richer Edwardian food does tend to make it harder to sleep if eaten too late in the day anyway.

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Afterward I spent 20 minutes on a contour drawing of a flower pot, per the instructions from The Natural Way to Draw. And in the afternoon I'd played the piano — Edvard Grieg died toward the end of the first decade of the 20th century, and so I played the morning part of the Peer Gynt Suite in his honour. Besides, the Beethoven sonata project has resumed, and I've reached "Les Adieux." Besides I'd read Beatrix Potter's Tale of two Bad Mice.

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Altogether the experiment felt too trivial this week, however, and that was why I stopped early. Uncle Pu telephoned us during our breakfast, telling us that our aunt K. had died. I was thinking about them both while I was walking around in Kreuzberg, because that neighbourhood is where they started out their lives together.