Dear Matt, Paul and Barbara

Thank you very much for your very kind wedding presents. I know we were meant to spend some of the money on a romantic sunset boat cruise in Portugal but unfortunately we didn’t get round to it so chose instead to spend it on a yoga retreat in Chiang Mai.

It is quite beautiful here. It is very relaxed and chilled out. It is all set in a little woodland in the hills surrounding Chiang Mai. They grow lots of vegetables here and have two cows and lots of ducks. We can spend most of our day lounging by the pool while men in conical hats tend to the vegetable patches and sweep the leaves off our lawn.

We have our own little bungalow in the woodlands, all self contained with its own bathroom and an outdoor shower. It is always quite warm outside so it is nice to shower away from the powerful aircon. I imagine as it is getting colder in England you are finding it hard to imagine how refreshing an outdoor shower is.

It has a king size bed and a proper duvet for the first time since we left. We have had to turn the aircon up quite high to get the benefits of it.

We have two meals a day, breakfast and dinner. The food in the open air restaurant, overlooking the vegetable patches is some of the best food we have had since leaving England.
Donna is particularly enamoured with the breakfast of real cereal, real tea and real poached eggs and our meals are often accompanied with cries of ‘it's amazing yet healthy’.
They don’t skimp on the portions either. We still have a creme brulee in our fridge that we haven’t been able to finish since the first night.

The place is very empty. It seems to be only us and a German man and Aussie woman who are on the same course as us who are both very nice so we mostly have the place to ourselves.

All would be idyllic here except…

Did I mention that it is a yoga retreat?

That means you have to do yoga...

At least twice a day.

Yup they make you get up at 7am every morning and solemnly bend your body into positions that any self respecting 36 year old man shouldn’t be bending his body into. Then just when you have recovered, they make you do it all over again at 4 o’clock every afternoon just for good measures, (with occasionally some meditation thrown in just before dinner in case you hadn’t had enough).

Seriously has anyone ever done this yoga s*** before? It is bloody hard work.

How Donna does it, I will never know. And she is better at it than me which is quite unfair. That is the last time I carry her handbag for her. If she can bend her body into unnatural positions for 3 hours every day then she can bloody well carry her handbag, I say.

The whole situation is not helped by the yoga teacher who, if we were going to be polite about the whole thing, is sick, twisted and completely evil. She takes great pleasure in hurting us all as much as possible. Both mentally and physically. Apparently the reason that I cannot touch my toes is not, as I always maintain, because I am unbendy. No it is because I am too fat!

I haven’t been able to touch my toes since I was 13 and, apart from a brief period at University when I discovered Indian curries, I have been quite slim ever since. Face it, my body just doesn’t bend that way.

We are now on our 3rd day which means we get to escape tomorrow.

That is 3 days without alcohol by the way, I hope you are all impressed.

You would think that it might be getting easier, the more we do it. And in fact this morning I thought that it had.

Half an hour in and there was I thinking; You know what? This ain’t so bad. I am actually starting to feel all a bit healthy/ hippie/zen-like (delete as appropriate).

Then the evil instructor announced that that was the warm up and we still had an hour of the real stuff to go.

Seriously, can’t we just do the warm up a bit longer? Doing the reverse dog just makes all the blood go to my head. Warrior 1 is ok but I can’t get the hang of 2 or 3.

At this point, I can’t help thinking it is a useful exercise for explaining Einstein’s theory of relativity: The idea that time moves relative to the human consciousness.

When you are sitting out in the afternoon, relaxing around the pool, time moves very fast. You turn around and suddenly it is ten to four and the day has whizzed by.

Relatively, when you are 40 minutes into an hour and a half yoga session. It feels like the longest hour and a half of your life. Every minute seems like an eternity.

But the things is, the minute the session finishes, it is great to be smug; happy that it is over but smug that we have completed it and can go and have that well deserved breakfast or dinner, feeling like we have bloody well earned it.

This place is beautiful and relaxed but if we weren’t being tortured every morning and afternoon, then we might get bored and not appreciate it as much. You need to do the hard work to enjoy the reward.

And you know what, if you see me at 10 to 4 crying a little bit they are tears of joy honestly.

Love

Jim and Donna