I wouldn’t want a child’s exercise to solely revolve around going to the gym

I wouldn’t want a child’s exercise to solely revolve around going to the gym.”Gaynor Dewsnap, a spokesperson for the British Heart Foundation, says that it is cardiovascular exercise such as running and jumping that is most effective in warding off heart disease. “Pumping iron is not that good for your heart,” she says.However, with recent research by the Health Education Authority showing that more than half of 11-to 16-year-olds walk for only 10 minutes per day, anything that gets children to break into a sweat is seen as a positive step in the right direction by most health practitioners.And the view that children won’t enjoy working out in the gym as much as playing outside may be out-dated. Joanna Sandler, the seven-year-old member of the Power Kids Academy, is now being taught to ride a bike by her dad and is also allowed to use her parents running machine and weights Which one does she prefer? “The running machine. It’s more grown up,” she says.Her mother, Nina, is just glad that she’s doing some exercise now. “It would be lovely to take the kids out for a bike ride after school,” she says “But I work part-time and I have three children I just don’t have time I think it would be great if there were more of these clubs. But you do have to pay for them and a lot of families aren’t in a position to be able to afford it.”With monthly fees for a child at the Next Generation gyms at £16 plus a joining fee of £100, these strategies for dealing with inactive children are simply unaffordable for many parents.However, research suggests that is not a parent’s ability to pay, but their own exercise levels that are most important in getting their children to be more active.The British Heart Foundation survey found that almost a fifth of young people are not encouraged to do exercise by their parents.”The evidence is that children follow what their parents do,” says Tony Waterston. “There’s no point in telling a child to do something and not do it yourself.

The whole family needs to be out walking, swimming and cycling.”Belinda Linden agrees “We need to take a long hard look at ourselves,” she says. “It’s not just children who have problems with lack of activity and obesity We’re all going down that road.”. Truth may often be pronounced as the first casualty of war, but a more obvious victim is reality. Writing from the safety of his study in the late Sixties, the composer Sir Arthur Bliss looked back at his experiences of the First World War with disbelief: “Did I really crawl on my belly in the mud at night towards the German trenches, patrolling with Mills bombs in my pockets and a revolver in my hand?” he asked.

“This picture is now as unreal as a scene from an old film.”When Chamber Domaine was planning its concert series on composers who had fought in or lived through the First World War, it little imagined how timely its decision would prove to be. A little too timely, in fact – Radio 3 cancelled the group’s broadcast promoting the season, thereby adding it to the occasionally bizarre list of music deemed unfit for public consumption following the World Trade Centre disaster. By the time the series began at the Wigmore Hall on 19 September, the whole world was on fire with images that – like Bliss’s memories – swung between the believable and unbelievable. Suddenly, music reflecting the complex emotions of war – albeit a different kind of war – became a much desired anchor to reality rather than an exercise in emotional archaeology.
The work included in this chamber series represents both composers who lived through WWI to become giants in British classical music, and those whose talent was annihilated in the trenches. Bliss survived the fighting in France, as did Vaughan Williams, who was a wagon-orderly because he had flat feet.

Elgar and Delius were much affected and influenced by the war, although far too old to fight; the triumphal swagger that characterised works like Pomp and Circumstance evaporated entirely from Elgar’s oeuvre, to be replaced by an elegiac introspection that led to the 1919 Cello Concerto.The most poignant items in the programme, however, are the works of George Butterworth and Ernest Farrar. Butterworth, in particular, was seen as a leading light of his musical generation, but a sniper’s bullet put paid to that.How do you paint the experiences of war in a score? Each composer had different answers, ranging from mournful anger to distilled poetic tenderness. From the writings of Bliss and the biography of Vaughan Williams, written by his second wife Ursula, it becomes obvious that while war as a distant concept evokes epic images of inhumanity, the wanton loss of life, and the clashing of giant political forces, as a day-to-day reality it also has its banalities, absurdities, and comic interludes, as well as moments of poignant, unexpected beauty.I go to the elegant Camden house where Ursula Vaughan Williams lives, to talk to her about how the war changed her husband. Vaughan Williams himself may have been dead since 1958, but in the books, the pictures, the bust glowering in the drawing-room, he is still overwhelmingly present. Now in her nineties, and as elegant as her surroundings, Ursula has an erratic grasp of words, even though the rhythms, delivery, and tone of voice indicate where a story starts, ends, and where the punchline is.