10 Daily Things

Clara Meadmore, a retired secretary, who still has her own hair, teeth, and sharp wit, never had time for a family and lived alone until going into care.

She said: “I’ve always had lots of platonic friendships with men but never felt the need to go further than that or marry.”

Miss Meadmore, who was born in Glasgow, and lived in Canada and New Zealand, before settling in Cornwall 40 years ago, also added that she had never had any interest in sex.

“When I was a girl you only had sex with your husband and I never married. I grew up in an era where little girls were to be seen and not heard so I had to learn to stand up for myself and earn my own living.

Miss Meadmore has never owned a television, but she enjoys the radio, and is a particular fan of the BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour programme. She also enjoys cooking, gardening and reading.

She saved up her salary and spent the money going on walking tours in many parts of Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, and she still has the diaries of the trips.

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Cabinet Magazine posted a great feature on the secret history of Cybex-like exercise machines. Apparently, the first “gym” filled with mechanical fitness contraptions was built by Swedish physician Gustav Zander in the late 19th century.

Zander’s mechanical horse was an early version of the Stairmaster, a contraption for cardiovascular fitness designed to imitate a “natural” activity. His stomach-punching apparatus evokes contemporary “ab-crunching” machines. What makes Zander so important, for anyone trying to trace the Cybex family tree, is what happened when his machines, created in a European cultural context, immigrated to the US in the early twentieth century. They are prototypes of the workout equipment now ubiquitous in American life.

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