My favourite character in Under Milk Woodwas always the mad Lord Cut-Glass, with his 66 clocks all set at different times, his dog-dish marked ‘Fido’ and his living in ‘a house and life’ at siege.
It reminds me of my body.
Thirty or so years ago I took it along to the doctor for some reason or other and, having expected to leave with a bundle of expensively reassuring pills to cheer it up, he simply recommended that I joined a gym and, worse still, insisted that I actually went to it. Up until that point, gyms were another country to me but, since then, I have gone along to one on about 3000 occasions, and I think it may be finally time to stop.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m coming up to a round number birthday and I really don’t care. Most bits of my body and mind work roughly how they used to, and even those bits that don’t can be helped in one way or another, with glasses, rubs, pills or alcohol. No, you won’t find me getting all precious because the number at the beginning of my age has flicked over another decade. In many parts of the world, people dream of getting to 60, so I’m happy and grateful to reach it and earn the bus pass. The word on the street is that I might also get a little pension from a nation still lost in gratitude at my eight years’ military service. Either that or arrested, I forget which.
But you will find me enjoying the gym less and less every time I go. Like Lord Cut-Glass and the closing off of his rooms, I have gradually given up any bit of equipment that makes me look inadequate, until my entire session is now done on the running machine and the adductor. Only when one of those isn’t available might you find me on something else. Gone is the elliptical trainer and the spinner; no more the rowing machine, the loose weights, the mats and the bench press. I walk in, trot on the treadmill, squeeze my legs together in a rather aggressive way and then head home about 20 minutes later. If I’ve done especially well, I treat myself to a grab bag of Cheesy Wotsits at the BP in Easebourne. Otherwise, I just listen to the Archers, and wish that someone would put Will out of his misery in an exquisitely painful way.
And if it were just me, it would be fine. Maybe even me and a trainer. But it’s not. If I go at seven in the morning, I get the company of platoons of unfeasibly focused and slender thirty somethings eating vegan nutrition bars, making socially responsible calls and looking smug. Twelve hours later, it’s the local lads pumping iron, drinking protein shakes and shouting suggestive innuendos at their mates whilst bench-pressing 80 kgs. At lunch time, it’s just mayhem, so the only time I find I can go is late afternoon, when the elderly men seem to congregate there. And just for a while, I look and feel as close to a God as I ever will, with my 45kg on the adductor and my 7.5 mph on the treadmill.
But even that is starting to go tits up. There’s this slightly creepy man who always puts himself on the treadmill next to mine, winds it up to about 9 mph and then looks me in the eye before shouting out: ‘Not bad for 80, eh?’ And his friend, of the same age, who has to put another 20kg on the adductor when he takes it over from me.
‘You’ll get used to all this in the end,’ he smiles empoweringly, like I haven’t been going there for five years already.
No, I think me and gyms are done. I just need to find something to bridge the ten-year gap between that and a bridge four.
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