Here’s a special personalised message for all those people preoccupied by health and fitness at this time of year … SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP!
My apologies for that outburst, but health and fitness bores are especially prevalent at this time of year. You can’t move without tripping over somebody determined to eat only dehydrated seaweed until February, star-jump around the kitchen every morning, or imagine themselves with a gastric band via Paul McKenna’s hypnosis exercises.
I’m not above spreading the health-boredom myself, but at least mine is a thinly veiled, passive-aggressive vegetarian version to convince people to eat less meat. Anyhow, generally vegetarians aren’t health bores – it’s impossible to be when, until very recently, you’d have been consulting the sole “vegetarian” British restaurant menu choice of: “Melted cheese on watery pasta, with more cheese on top, perhaps a couple of mushrooms. Squirty cream – optional.”
Come new year, the real health bores come out to play – though “play” might be the wrong word. This lot tend to be hard work with their pious ranting about abs-definition, show-off giant beakers of kale juice, and solemn adorning of those wristband monitors that tell you whether doing an “army” boot camp in the park is better for you, than say, being sprawled drooling in a sugar-coma, surrounded by empty Quality Street wrappers.
Newsflash: exercise is better for you than being completely sedentary and eating lots of sweets! Who knew? Oh right, everyone did. Yet every January this news is treated with widespread galvanised astonishment that verges on seasonal hysteria.
All of which is rather puzzling. After all, if you need to get fit now, this was probably true back in September, if not earlier. I’ve done my fair share of pointlessly joining gyms, doing little more taxing than posing with a bottle of water. However, at least I’d join in autumn to avoid the rush, and fail to get fit at a different (less corny) time of year. Moreover, when people such as myself exercise, we do so with grim silent bitterness, fury, and no attempt at a good attitude. Unlike health bores, who indulge in endless self-aggrandising chitchat about their preferred methodology. “I’m doing this/drinking that/eating whatever.” If yapping about getting fit got you fit, all of them would be Usain Bolt.
The odd thing I’ve noticed is that genuinely fit people rarely number among the garrulous New Year bores. This is because they don’t lunge gracelessly and with palpable desperation at fitness once a year – it’s truly their life, so they just quietly get on with it. Maybe because their regimes and lingo are quite advanced, they can’t really be bothered talking to people who don’t understand the shorthand and can’t keep up. They’d rather discreetly have discussions with each other – all the while trying to be patient with your occasional interjections of: “Eh?’ “What?” and “Can I have that sucked Curly Wurly if you don’t want it?”
The ones causing the trouble seem to the new year-only fitness brigade, with their tell-tale torn-out magazine articles promising them a perfect body (somehow) if they eat this food (usually unobtainable outside central London), do this exercise (impossible for all but circus-folk), with results promised within a highly dubious but very specific time period, short enough not to scare off the slackers.
These are the fair-weather exercisers – the January know-it-alls. What they should realise is that they don’t know anything. If they did know it, they wouldn’t be boring us about it. They’d be happily chatting to other health freaks instead. All year round. Instead, these people are the seasonally health conscious – most of whom will have given up whatever regime they took up by March at the latest. A mournful mountain of discarded wristbands, step-counters, and droning hypnosis CDs, the only evidence that they ever tried. Never mind, there’s always next year.
Such bad taste to mock someone’s bad taste, darling
Shame on those who mocked footballer Andy Carroll and his pregnant fiancee Billi Mucklowcorrect’s style of furnishing their new home. The decor is all about pink sofas, zebra prints, mirrored ceilings and home beauty salons. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but that doesn’t excuse the vitriol or snobbery, dated snobbery at that. Haven’t some people got over footballer bling yet? Are they so socially insecure that it makes them feel better to guffaw over somebody else’s choice of animal prints?
More pertinently, why is this kind of attitude always one way – directed straight at the working classes? How about walking into someone’s home and finding that they’re slowly choking to cliched death on their Farrow & Ball fantasies? Isn’t this just as hilarious, just as grand a larceny of hackneyed style concepts?
In truth, there is no right or wrong, just what an individual prefers – everyone knows that “good taste” was invented to make pesky upstarts feel paranoid and keep them in their place. I, for one, hope that Carroll and Mucklow enjoy their home, have a wonderful life in it with their baby and refuse to let the taste snobs get them down.
My guilt has me going round in circles
There was a story last week about a man trying to cure his goldfish of constipation, even taking it to the vet for an expensive procedure.
Well, I’ve (sort of) been there. Family Babs had a goldfish (Bubbles) and, dear reader, I killed him. Yes that’s right, I killed him! But not before I desperately tried to save him. My mistake was to put Bubbles into the wrong shaped tank (too round; not enough oxygen) and to realise too late how much cleaning was required (Goldfish poop like you wouldn’t believe). Once Bubbles started struggling, I didn’t ring a vet (but only because I didn’t think of it).
I went on to the internet bulk-buying gadgets to help feed and clean, and then phoned a nice man who promised to come around to clean the tank, Asap.
Unfortunately, Bubbles expired before Tank Cleaning Guy got to the house. Worse, I had to witness his terrible death throes at “super-size”, owing to the magnifying effect of the round tank. There was poor Bubbles, jerking away, looking as big as a trout, to horrific and haunting effect.
Tank Cleaning Guy might sound like a character in a porn movie, but he should be commended for his immense patience and kindness over many increasingly hysterical, and then grief-stricken, phone calls.
I had to scoop Bubbles out of the tank with (irony of ironies) a fish-slice. I was branded a goldfish killer by my own flesh and blood.
Don’t ask me to laugh about this – it will always be too soon. RIP Bubbles (swimming forever in the big, appropriately shaped fish-tank in the sky). The man who took his fish to the vet wished to remain anonymous, perhaps fearing ridicule.
I say this to him – if no one else understands you, I do.
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