Bernard Heydorn

Cardio vascular diseases are big killers in modern times. Studies from around the world show longevity is more often manifested in groups and populations who walk and move more, and eat healthy foods. It is time to park that car. Cardiovascular, skeletal, muscular and digestive systems work much better with movement. The neuropsychological and emotional benefits are also evident. You look younger, you feel younger and you can live longer. Your body weight is more in line with your body type.
Using Garmin GPS sports watches that our youngest son gave my wife and I at Christmas, we have been tracking more closely our movement and physical activities. We discovered that dancing for 40 minutes was equivalent to walking for over two and a half kilometers. By the end of one evening of dance, the distance covered could be quite significant. No wonder we sleep well after a night out!
The average North American reportedly walks about one mile a day, the equivalent of 1.6 kilometers. It is recommended that the average person should walk about 10,000 steps or approximately five miles or 8 kilometers a day. Very few folks come close to this in modern society.
During our stay in Portugal last winter, we met a 90-year old Englishman and his 80-plus year old wife, who walked the recommended distance daily. The terrain in Portugal, by the way, is often up and downhill, not an easy task. That put us to shame. When I questioned them about their life style, it looked like they ate simply and sensibly, drank wine, played tennis and golf, and walked every day. Neither of them has had any joint replacement or serious ailment and he has no prescribed medication! They were both slim and good dancers. Neither of them looked their age.
My wife and I have been trying to keep fit and healthy through physical activity and movement. We dance on a regular basis and try to go for daily walks of at least 40 minutes. We also try to keep fit by cycling and trekking, karate practice, gardening, outdoor games like lawn bowls, mini golf, and bocce ball. We are lucky that we have kept our weight and health in good shape, well into our retirement years. Combined with sensible eating (not dieting), we have been able to do without “meds” so far, into our 70’s.
As of late, we were inspired by an annual 100 meters race for seniors over the age of 80 in the USA. The winner who was an 82-year old male covered the distance in 17 seconds, while the oldest, a woman of 100 years finished the race in one minute and 17 seconds. Her advice was to keep moving every day and eat for health, not for taste. Kudos to them all.
My wife and I, given that we have some time before we reach 80, have started practicing for the race. I have cut my time to 26 seconds. I have had to take time off from training as some aches and pains showed up in parts of my body I had never heard from before. It just goes to show that you are not as young as you would like to believe.
Activities can take their toll on different parts of your body, be it dancing, cycling, jogging, swimming, running, playing tennis, walking, or working out in a gym. You should check with your doctor, physio or medical adviser as to what is best or suitable for you. Start slow and work up. There is a tendency in people to favour inertia over movement. Energy and motivation are needed to get moving. As you get better, increase your pace to get more out of each activity, all within reasonable limits. Remember it is better to wear out than rust out!
It should also be fun. “Pumping iron” may be good for muscular and strength development but does not seem much fun to me. I don’t necessarily believe in the adage “there can be no gain without pain”.
Now back to parking the car and walking. To the moderns, that is a joke. They do everything with their car or phone. How about cycling to work or parking some distance away and walking. Avoid using the elevator. Walk your children to school. Get involved in walking groups, bird watchers, naturalist associations, camping, hiking but not hitch hiking, and even standing is better than sitting. Yoga is a beneficial exercise and relaxation activity, good for body and soul.
Treadmills are useful and convenient. Gyms can be helpful but expensive. Zumba, line dancing, ballroom, Latin, country dancing and other formats are often fun, in spite of having “two left feet”. They are also a good way to meet people and make friends.
I am so involved with movement that I can’t keep my legs still in bed, what they now call “restless leg syndrome”. You can’t win! I am sure that there are many other activities to keep us moving. In the meanwhile I must move on. If the creeks don’t rise and the sun still shines I’ll be talking to you.

Puddicombe Ken, Down Independence Boulevard and Other Stories, MiddleRoad Publishers, 2017.

By Romeo Kaseram
In a work of reportorial consistency, Ken Puddicombe’s Down Independence Boulevard and Other Stories explores the lives of a people scattered near and far into homelessness following a near-apocalyptic and dehiscent eruption in a place the reader recognises as British Guiana. With Puddicombe’s language unrelenting as it is visceral and bare, the 16 stories here are presented with a narrative focused on archival intent, the collection fitting into the inventory of the Caribbean’s near-dystopic, post-colonial oeuvre. Puddicombe is also the author of Racing with the Rain, and Junta.
In this latest collection are stories tracing the struggles of those who remained in post-independence Guyana as they pick up the pieces following violent political and divisive, civil turmoil. Alongside these stories at ground zero are the lives of those who were scattered abroad, where they now drift, negotiate daily lives, and struggle as an emergent diaspora.
It is evident in the first story of the collection, ‘Black Friday’, the country’s capital has imploded with civil insurrection when Joseph speaks darkly, while scanning the burning city:
“Things will never be the same again,” he said, as he continued to gaze at the conflagration, where sparks and a tremulous layer of pyrotechnic display continued unabated. “Here we are, nineteen sixty-two, and we’re going backwards instead of forwards. It’s never onward with this country.” He shook his head. “There is no future here. I have to get out.”
His next words are filled with the foreboding undertones of a Pandora’s Box violently blown open. Waving his hands in the direction of the conflagration, Joseph says: “The first time I’m seeing something like this in all my born days. This breakdown in law and order will start a trend. Once the genie’s out of the bottle, you can’t get it back in.”
The colonial centrality does not hold that is British hegemony in the face of internal and violent, racist rivalry for political control in an emerging, independent Guyana. Joseph says with dark portent: “When the dogs of war were set free and insurrection and looting started, the rabble-rousers didn’t distinguish friend from foe.”
As the patriarchal head of the family and its business, Augusto laments: “They looted everything on the floor, then they moved to the warehouse and stripped it bare. They even carted away the fixtures before they set fire to the store. Why did they have to set fire to it? I can’t understand them. Why set fire and destroy everything that I’ve built up? I’ve always been good to them – why did they do it?”
British Guiana falls apart. The established business run by Augusto, started and built by his father Salvador from humble beginnings as a street peddler, has been looted and razed. In the flux of uncertainty, terror, and racial violence, what was predictable is now unknown; stability is overturned; and what was once presumed to be an unassailable centre by the many representative characters making up the people similarly experiencing Augusto’s betrayal all comes crashing down before unbelieving eyes.
It is not only businesses built with sweat and dedication across generations that topple. In one of the many evocations of homelessness affecting all the races throughout this collection, as a motif it is easily discernible in the story’s name itself, A House Is Not A Home. Here a family is similarly conflicted, torn apart, and set adrift from what characters similar to the traumatised and stunned Augusto once considered to be rootedness and stability. As Cassandra waits for her ride to arrive to take her and the children to the airport, husband Muniram has chosen to stay and weather the firestorms of terror in racial confrontations and escalating violence and arson. Even as the home is divided and torn apart, Cassandra poignantly contemplates the house she is leaving behind:
“Of course she would regret leaving. Her father had contributed his time and labour... His carpenter’s skill was evident in every floorboard, every zinc sheet on the roof, and every slab of riser on the stairs. Building it had absorbed all their savings and her parents had contributed some of theirs… That was before the trouble started between the races…
“‘Cassie, this is our house. It’s our home. It’s where we belong, all our money piled into it.’
“‘You don’t have to remind me of that, Muni. … a house is not a home if you have to look over your shoulders all the time, not if your life is in danger.’”
Even as Puddicombe explores the upheavals splitting the centre of the households making up the different races and ethnicities in an emergent Guyana, at the same time he remains inexorable in detailing how the ballistic dehiscence scattered many Guyanese nationals far away from the homeland to see them landing abroad in similarly unstable, foreign landscapes.
In one of the stories later in the collection, Ram Singh Gone and He Nevvah Coming Back, the trauma of the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers in New York sees its protagonist emerging out of ground zero as one of the many heroes. However, the backstory to Singh’s heroism reveals him to be deliberately flying low under the official, immigration radar. Having fled Guyana, Singh has exchanged one homelessness and its concomitant instabilities for another. In the light of his heroic effort, having sustained and survived serious injuries during the terrorist attack on the North Tower, a healing Singh must choose between the bright lights and being richly rewarded by the US authorities he has so far successfully avoided, with continuing his covert life of being faceless as an illegal immigrant and impoverished in America.
To fit Down Independence Boulevard and Other Stories into the Caribbean’s oeuvre is to place it among other works exploring similar motifs of upheaval, violence, and homelessness. These motifs are positioned as a sequel to the corollary of emerging civil unrest and resistance at the conclusion of George Lamming’s seminal, post-colonial text, In the Castle of My Skin. Puddicombe’s narrative positions similarly alongside motifs of betrayal and diasporic misalignment notable in Neil Bissoondath’s, Digging Up the Mountains.
In the bigger picture, Puddicombe’s work – instinctive, crisp, and consistently reportorial in its writing style, is a wholesome addition to what the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci describes as the task of compiling an inventory. Down Independence Boulevard and Other Stories fits seamlessly into what Gramsci says is the depositing within us of the history of family, a nation, and a tradition, in what he notes is an infinity of traces. For its specific reportage and ineluctable details of a conquered people, who having been torn apart and has bitterly turned on themselves as part of the fallout from the trauma and divisiveness of colonialism, Down Independence Boulevard and Other Stories is the latest addition to the inventory helping us to understand our universal and troubling human condition.

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