Australia has an indisputably macho culture. Just look at the sports: Aussie Rules Football (AFL) or ‘aerial ping pong’ as Daniela calls it, looks like the most gruelling and skilfully-demanding pursuit ever contrived. The ball-handling skills are little short of astounding, the pace breakneck, the athleticism breathtaking. And speaking of ball-handling, the playing kit is skin-tight and cut on the skimpy side. Look no further for a peerless display of pecs, delts and tats, ladies.

This is just one of the football disciplines involving odd-shaped balls. There’s also rugby union – which I played to an abysmal standard at school, loving it while failing to bother the scoreboard – and rugby league, a stripped-down version with 13 players whose tacklings and scrumming are less likely to confer lifelong lower-back problems.

But much as you may have the impression that having played rugby, cultivated a passion for power tools, and become pilot of a V6-engined 4×4 vehicle, your correspondent is a muscular macho ‘unit’ (as they say here), you’re in for a disappointment. Of course you may have gleaned this already from the occasional mentions in these pages of poetry, pretty flowers and colourful birds.

But it’s not a problem for me. I gained a lot of proof early on that machismo probably wasn’t going to be a powerful guiding light by which to navigate life’s highways and byways. Hence the poetry and stuff. It was quite freeing, being a hip young lit student with a pierced earlobe and infrequent shaving habits – you certainly learn a lot about yourself when things like articulateness (articularity?) and long hair become the critical criteria whereby your manliness is judged.

Which is why lately yours truly has been heading down to the Braidwood Regional Arts Group (snappily abbreviated to BRAG) for yoga classes of a Tuesday evening. Reluctantly being the only boy in the Tennyson junior school choir in 1976 was good preparation for this – by comparison, being the only man in the BRAG Tuesday yoga class is a piece of piss. (Singing a soprano solo from Handel’s Messiah in the Bulawayo City Hall in front of a crowd of several hundred holds as much terror as any trial of physical and mental endurance.)

Now I’ll be the first to admit that Sting has received a bit of a ribbing in this blog – richly deserved, of course, as post-Police he did rather take a turn to the pompous side. But mocking his yogic predilections is a bit of a low blow, particularly when he’s done so many other things worthy of ridicule. That tiny guitar, for instance. For God’s sake man, if you play a ukulele, have the gumption to call it that.

The funny thing is, despite its associations with barefoot mung-bean-chomping raffia-weaving hippies, yoga can be a demanding and pretty tiring pursuit. Not, perhaps, in the same league as AFL’s ball-handlers, but of a character all of its own. It’s part of the practice that you can make it as easy or hard as you like, depending on how it moves you, man. And it kind of sneaks up on you. Yeah, OK, touch toes, no problem. Downward Dog you say? No worries. Pigeon pose – hm, that smarts a bit. What’s this now – stand on one leg holding the other ankle out to the side at 90 degrees with the opposite hand? For sixty seconds? Kindly summon the paramedics, namaste very much.

You’re not supposed to strive to ‘get it right’. Good enough is great, if it means next time you can do it more easily and gain a few more of the benefits. And benefits there are: balance, breathing, suppleness, core strength, relaxation. The ulterior motive for me is that makes a supercharged stretching session to prevent running and cycling injuries – and does a great job relieving the persistent lower-back issues resulting from injuries incurred as second-row for Gifford Technical High’s under-15B rugby union side, 1980.

Best of all, there’s a bit of fun involved. Not rib-tickling guffaws of bawdy merriment, but something more nuanced. There’s really nowhere to hide when you’re trying to get your body to conform to – and remain in – some quite uncomfortable positions. It’s mental as well as physical. You may be able to bench 225, but this is strength of a different order: you’re going to fall over, groan, and/or swear semi-audibly under your breath. But so’s everyone else, sooner or later – so there’s a very nice accepting atmosphere.

No-one’s blowing shrill blasts on a whistle, getting in your face and bawling that you must go for the burn. There’s no shattering house music. No charlatan is extolling the moral virtues of teamwork. It’s all rather grown-up: you get out what you put in and you’re expected to sincerely try your best.

And then afterwards, you have a little chat with the instructor and the ladies, and compare notes about goings-on around town. This week, for example, it emerged that all three of the women in the class had lived at one time or another in Singapore. How’s that for a coincidence? (And no, merely living in Asia doesn’t predispose you to yoga – correlation/causation etc.)

Two days on and the stiffness that’s emerging in places I never knew could stiffen is testament to the work put in during class. And this afternoon, cranking the bike up the slopes of Mount Gillamatong, I found myself practising that deep, rhythmic breath control which the local rabbits and possums probably found alarming but which seemed very much to help crest the rise without inducing the symptoms of a coronary. I think it’s working. Sting may be in for an apology in person next time I run into him.