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Nude drawing? Check. Perfectly-cooked rock cakes? Check. Downward dog in the front room? Well, sort of... How one Mail writer beat the boredom by learning something new (almost) every day
IT is one of lockdown’s most unsettling tests of character. Stuck inside the four walls of our homes for weeks on end, mental horizons can close in and days can pass in a blur of coronavirus statistics and Netflix escapism.
With social diaries empty until further notice, Fridays feel frighteningly similar to Mondays, this week a carbon copy of last.
But, as I discovered this week, freedom from lockdown’s rut is only a few mouse clicks away.
I set myself the challenge of learning three new skills from Britain’s ever-growing army of online teachers sharing their know-how on anything and everything, with inquiring minds logging in from anywhere and everywhere.
I took part in a life drawing class hosted from Glasgow and featuring a nude model in Edinburgh called Mirjam – depicted with varying degrees of aptitude by sketchers from Pollokshields to Portland, Oregon.
I enrolled in my first – and, let’s be honest, probably last – yoga session, then moved to the kitchen to report for baking class and see if rock cake making could be added to my skill set.
The finished product looked more like rock cakes, certainly, than my sketches had looked like Mirjam.
And, however far short of Grade A I may have fallen, this week felt markedly different; those mental horizons stretched wider and lockdown felt more liveable.
Here, then, is my diary of online learning.
ART
THIS is a mistake, I told myself as I signed up for All The Young Nudes – Life Drawing Online on Monday.
Your most recent artworks are decades old doodles in the margins of school jotters.
You have zero experience of this kind of drawing because, for reasons which may be obvious, nude models were not exactly a regular fixture at state secondary art classes.
I had visions of the host, Joanna Susskind, asking to see everyone’s work and having to hold up my disastrous efforts to gales of guffaws from the whole classroom, from Johnstone to Johannesburg.
The reality, mercifully, was nothing like that. Indeed, All The Young Nudes could surely lay claim to a gold standard in chilled-out online learning.
Pour yourself a glass of wine, they say, listen along on Spotify to our playlist for the evening and use any medium you please – watercolours, felt tip pen, crayon, charcoal… choice is yours.
Want to show us your work? Email a photo and we will feature it in the gallery during the interval next week. You’d rather die than let it into the sight of another living soul? Fine too. You’re the customer.
And yes, there is a financial consideration here. For £5 for a two-hour session, would-be artists gather as night class students might to hone their life drawing skills or – in my case – discover if there are any there in the first place.
The key difference, of course, is we are learning remotely, which affords the pupil a pleasing amount of latitude.
You drift off for a minute and stare out of the window? No one can see. Not even teacher.
You are embarrassed by your lack of progress? Your classmates need never know. And, as the doubts dissipate, so the truly valuable elements of the virtual classroom experience become more obvious.
We are remote learners in lockdown, communing through wine, music, online chat and a collective endeavour to render fair representations of Mirjam’s curves.
She started us off with a series of two-minute poses on the bare wooden floor of her Edinburgh home. Two minutes? After that time I had got as far as a thigh and a buttock, neither of which appeared to belong to Mirjam – or even together.
Gradually, however, the poses became longer and the screen split in two. In one half there was the model and in the other a real artist would demonstrate how he or she would take on such a subject.
‘Don’t feel you have to draw what you see,’ counselled artist Gavin Glover as he gave Mirjam pink boots she was not wearing, made her brown hair blue and depicted her mouth as a Munchesque scream.
Far more literal in her approach was a second artist, Jen Robson, who, in only ten minutes, produced both fine art and a fascinating lesson in how to achieve it.
Witnessing their contrasting styles was an education in itself. It made me want to try again, put their instruction into practice and discover whether – lurking behind those crude and unflattering lines – there may be a style of my own.
The best I can say is the latter efforts were an improvement on the earlier ones but, for all that, should probably remain safely under lock and key for eternity if not rather longer.
Art class was most stimulating, however, and £5 a small price to pay for the pleasure of attempting something completely new.
My 368 classmates around the world appeared to be satisfied customers, too.
I’ll be back and, who knows, maybe one day a Brocklebank original will bear scrutiny in the All The Young Nudes online gallery.
YOGA
THIS was the one that would give my poor, tired brain a rest.
It was the Mickey Mouse option in a timetable otherwise burdened with challenges.
Lay myself out on the mat, do a few stretches, hold still for a second or two.
Yup, all of the above appeared to fall within my body’s skill set and, if a pleasing sense of inner calm should inhabit my person in the process, so much the better. These are stressful times.
That was the thinking, anyway, as I signed up for an hour-long lesson on the basics of something called Ashtanga yoga. Not until I had
paid my £9 did I know anything about Ashtanga – or much at all about yoga as it turned out.
Instruction came via a Zoom feed from what may have been the living room of Edinburgh-based Simon Kirkness of Meadowlark Yoga. Well, I was in my living room, too. There the similarities between us ended.
What I had failed to grasp about Ashtanga yoga is that it is among the most energetic varieties of the ancient discipline – where your inhalations and exhalations are synchronised with individual poses, all of which are linked by rapid, flowing movements.
Mr Kirkness and, I suspect, the rest of the class of 14 grasped all of this just fine. ‘Up dog and inhale…’ he would instruct ‘…and down dog and exhale.’
I think that was how it went, although it could easily have been vice versa.
Fact is, by the time we moved to canine impressions on our yoga mats, I was pretty bushed.
If I happened to be breathing out at the same time as our instructor then it was more likely by accident than design.
And if my up dog coincided with his then it was probably because I was two movements behind rather than one or three.
Worryingly, our class was barely 15 minutes old. Yet here, once again, the benefits of online learning made themselves apparent.
Were this a traditional yoga class, the student melted in a heap on his yoga mat after a mere 15 minutes of exercise would be feeling pretty foolish, particularly in the light of his earlier bravado.
Lockdown affords us the licence to fail in private.
It even allows us to bunk off with impunity – as I did for the next couple of exercises while I caught my breath.
Yet, even as I sat on the sidelines and watched the workout unfold on my screen, the communal benefits were evident.
For, although the students were actually in living rooms dotted all over the country and further afield, we were exercising together, aching in the same places – possibly even ducking class at precisely the same moments.
Yoga, it is fair to say, may not be for me. Comparing my feeble stretches and jerky transitions with the full and fluid ones of our instructor left me fairly convinced that I would rather be out on my bike getting fresh air than on a floor mat inside, coaxing neglected muscles into flexibility.
Yet trying it was an enriching experience – and yes, an inner serenity did descend.
It was the kind that smiles at the fulfilment of having tried something new.
Even if you didn’t enjoy it much.
BAKING
THIS one would require some preparation. Across the land, baking has become the lockdown pursuit of the masses.
In wave one of panic buying in supermarkets, eggs were as hard to come by as the teeth of the hens which laid them.
By week six it was the essentials of home baking that the discerning self-isolator craved.
Self-raising flour was, not all that surprisingly, a key ingredient in London home baking school Bread Ahead’s recipe for rock cakes. Vanilla essence, too.
I was lucky to score some from an out-of-the-way supplier on Glasgow’s South Side.
Raw materials assembled, then, I enrolled in the daily lessons offered for free by Bread Ahead owner Matthew Jones.
This involved nothing more complex than following the business on Instagram and heading over to its page at 2pm where, in return for a few plugs for his book and his bakery, Mr Jones will demonstrate how to make some of his bestloved products.
Monday was to be carrot cake. I tuned in to familiarise myself with the format.
Mr Jones, a born communicator, takes us through the process with great clarity and attention to detail while his eager pupils bombard him with questions.
What size baking tray? Can I use soya milk instead? Would glutenfree flour work? How many eggs did you say?
His wife’s job is to fire the most pertinent of those questions at him while he attempts to continue both the bake and the lesson, which he does with admirable unflappability.
Tuesday was rock cake day and, despite my wealth of ignorance in the patisserie department, I had decided unflappability was my best policy, too.
What was the worst that could happen? A third endeavour for which I had absolutely no natural flair? Bring it on.
And yet, to my great surprise, failure never truly came.
Sure, there was a steep learning curve. The extent to which bakers stick their bare paws in the mixture they are preparing was a revelation to me.
‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Couldn’t I just stir it with a wooden spoon?’
It was probably the daftest question Mr Jones was invited to field all week.
So silly, in fact, that his wife never put it to him.
What I did not bother to ask was whether cranberries were an acceptable substitute for the raisins he used in his recipe.
I didn’t care. If, in theory, I were to be enjoying one or more of these cakes with a cup of tea in an hour’s time, raisins would form no part of the equation.
And so we pressed on, my rock cakes heading into the oven in unison with Mr Jones’s – indeed in unison with rock cakes across the globe for, typically, his classroom size is into four figures.
And, exactly 14 minutes later, out they came, looking suspiciously like something someone else must have made.
Indeed, dare I say it, they looked surprisingly similar to the specimens on my tutor’s tray.
I cannot vouch for the taste of Mr Jones’s rock cakes but mine are almost all gone. Delicious with raspberry jam.
How many times over the years have I scoffed home baking with barely an approving smack of the lips for the work that went into it? Hundreds? Thousands?
Well, these rock cakes were mine – my first batch – formed by these hands alone.
I now know what it actually means to hear that they went down a treat.
It has been an instructive week. And, in a time of unremittingly bad news, the good news is lockdown’s opportunities for further learning are limitless.