This sport could be used to provide relief from the other more strenuous mind games that I played to keep myself amused during those night-time hours: working my way through the 92 English football league clubs in strict alphabetical order, counting backwards from 900, and, once I had mastered braille, reading the books for which I needed no night lamp.
Never mind that Mr Campbell has so far got off lightly at the Hutton inquiry; never mind the strenuous denials that the Kelly affair had anything to do with the timing of his departure.
Following the poet Jeremias Decker, whose portrait Rembrandt painted and who could find no higher praise for the artist than to praise his mind, I wanted to register the strenuous creativity of his restless intellect, not just the emotive expressiveness.
"He has the kind of presence of mind and integrity needed for this kind of strenuous project," she says.
For all the mundanity of its subject matter, the excerpt presents boredom as something more strenuous and exalted than the friendly helper depicted by the neuroscientists, keeping our minds revved up even when we think we're idling.
"First thought, best thought" was his governing principle: no heed to the high-modernist idea of poem as patiently constructed artifact, but an equally strenuous discipline, for it was only with hours of daily meditation that he maintained his wide-open path from mind to breath.
The Twickenham eminence Lord Wakefield forecast a game played on artificial surfaces, its teams boasting "greater professionalism - but only, of course, purely as an attitude of mind" (of course, milord), and a midwinter break which these amateurs could "devote to other strenuous activities like skiing".
These relatively non-strenuous exercises can certainly improve mood and may bring about subtle physiologic brain changes dampening down our minds' rational filters.
Sometimes called "runner's high," a kind of mind-body euphoria is thought to exist when you start to push your body with strenuous exercise.
It's a bit strenuous at times, figuring out which dress she's referring to and then taking it apart in your mind, according to her description.
