Books can ruin your body

The Last of the Mohicans was to blame. I should never have read it. If I hadn't asked for it as a From Prize for being a swotty schoolgirl when I was in the Lower 1Vth, I'd never have developed bad feet. Thing is, I read about how Indians track silently through the forest by walking on the very outsides of their feet.
I practised and practised until I couldn't hear my footsteps even on crispy autumn leaves. I'd walk on the very outside of my sole, then let my foot roll gently inwards until the whole foot was connected with the ground. Very bad. After 40 years of such bad treament, ankles and ligaments start to go, and eventually, if you're very unlucky (as I was), the arches collapse. How ever did those Indians manage? I suppose the terrain they were walking on exercised their feet more than hard, flat city pavements do. And there was one piece of vital info I didn't take on board and that was, they only walked like that when they were tracking. Not all the time, 24/7. In any case, if their ankles went, they could always rope a passing pinto pony and hop on.
This isn't the only example of literature and the arts being to blame for misalignments in my body. Around the same time, I had a crush on Dirk Bogarde and went to see him as Sidney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. Oh, that hollow-cheeked, haunted-eyed look of his as he rode the tumbrel to his doom. (Not the tumble drier, that was another sort of film entirely.) In the movie, he displayed a fine turn of sardonic eyebrow-raising, keeping the right one still while lifting the other questioningly.
I just had to master that. It took hours in front of the mirror until I had sufficient control of my eyebrow muscles and could do the left eyebrow lift to perfection. I don't know why I bothered. My measly eyebrows weren't dark and saturnine. They weren't even male. And ever since, my specs don't appear to sit horizontally on my face, all due to that permanently askew brow.
I forgot to mention that at age 11, I read Thunderhead and My Friend Flicka and, for a blissful year, cantered down the road leading with my off hind (left leg to you) and taking massive leaps over park benches. I got so good at the high jump that, at 14, I could jump my own height of 5ft 4 ins over my mum's washing line, and, galloping along the grass verges in front of the houses in our Liverpool Street, could take off and do a long jump clean over a double driveway. No wonder my left ankle is dodgy. But O, to feel my mane flying in the breeze again as I soared fearlessly into the air, Pegasus to the last.