Start > Run
A-Who-Irons had the following amusing anecdote to relate as we sat and drank our Asda-Value-Teabags tea in Container World yesterday:
Fresh from her exercise class of some description or other, A-W-I had popped into Asda to purchase things necessary for a busy and fulfilling lifestyle, including a brace of delicious, chocolately Mars Bars. At the check-out, she encountered another woman who she recognised as a kindred soul from the exercise class. The woman glanced into A-W-I's trolley, clocked the Mars Bars, and delivered her opinion as follows:
"Is it really worth it," the interfering busybody kind and concerned lady enquired, in tones which - if A-W-I's rendition of the event is to be believed, and I have no reason to suspect embellishment of any sort - simultaneously conveyed both sorrow and disgust, lightly seasoned with a healthy sprinkling of condescension, "Is it really worth it, considering how hard you have worked..."
Now, A-W-I is not normally a woman lost for a suitable reply to such a comment, but this caught her rather off-guard, and she mumbled a reply to the effect that the dastardly Mars Bars were for her two teenage sons, to which Ms-Concerned-Citizen-of-the-Year smiled in triumph and delivered the ultimate riposte:
"My daughter," she informed A-W-I proudly, "Is a vegetarian!"
Well, what can you say to that? Something involving carrots, probably, and a highly novel and entertaining use for them to boot. Not wishing to cause a scene, though, and find herself banned from the frozen veg and gossip magazines for life, A-W-I merely thanked her for her input and made it back to her car before the urge to commit an unspeakable act of violence overwhelmed her entirely.
I found this all quite fascinating, because it's the sort of thing which would never happen to me. Partly because I have spent a large part of my adult life cultivating the sort of facial expression and body-language which suggests that any person unwise enough to inflict their random opinions on me in a national Supermarket chain will be rendered into something which could be profitably sold under the brand name "Atora", but mostly, in this particular instance, because there exists a slightly less-than-zero probability that I would ever find myself involved in any activity for which the word "exercise" might be invoked as a description.
I did exercise once. Against my will. It was in High School - PE was compulsory on the grounds that it was a cheap way of keeping teenagers occupied character-building and fitness-enhancing. The theory, then as now, was that the effects of good, healthy, outdoor exercise during one's teenage years would stay with one for life, and in a way that has turned out to be true. The result of compulsory PE in High School as far as I was concerned was that I vowed never ever to have any truck with exercise in any form for the rest of my life, and during the course of that life, littered as it is with broken resolutions, unkept promises and degenerate backsliding, that vow stands out as a shining beacon of consistency and iron will.
The result of this, of course, is that at 50 I am totally unable to run more than a few yards without getting out of breath, but this was also true when I was 15, and had 3 hours of PE a week, walked 1.5 miles to school and back twice a day (home for lunch), walked 3 miles to the Sports Centre and back twice a week and swam up and down the bloody swimming pool for an hour while there, and general went everywhere by Shank's pony since there was no local bus service and this was back in the days when making teenagers lives difficult was seen as a sacred parental duty. Surely, with all this magical exercise I ought to have been whip-thin, cardio-vascularly enhanced and able to jog around a hockey pitch like a gazelle on steriods?
Well - no. If the genetic lottery has determined that you are one of nature's ambulatory slime-moulds, then no amount of exercise will alter that. This, of course, goes against the current received wisdom which states that exercise will make you thin, beautiful, sexy, able to leap tall buildings at a bound and able to think of a witty and cutting reply to smarmy busybodies in supermarkets who think it is somehow their business to stop you buying Mars Bars.
But for all her sweaty and empurpling exercises, A-W-I is no thinner and no more able to run away from hungry lions than me. She does, however, have immeasurably poorer taste in home furnishings and decor. I rest my case.
Now I have to go and disassemble my computer. I have failing memory. And the computer is malfunctioning too.
Fresh from her exercise class of some description or other, A-W-I had popped into Asda to purchase things necessary for a busy and fulfilling lifestyle, including a brace of delicious, chocolately Mars Bars. At the check-out, she encountered another woman who she recognised as a kindred soul from the exercise class. The woman glanced into A-W-I's trolley, clocked the Mars Bars, and delivered her opinion as follows:
"Is it really worth it," the interfering busybody kind and concerned lady enquired, in tones which - if A-W-I's rendition of the event is to be believed, and I have no reason to suspect embellishment of any sort - simultaneously conveyed both sorrow and disgust, lightly seasoned with a healthy sprinkling of condescension, "Is it really worth it, considering how hard you have worked..."
Now, A-W-I is not normally a woman lost for a suitable reply to such a comment, but this caught her rather off-guard, and she mumbled a reply to the effect that the dastardly Mars Bars were for her two teenage sons, to which Ms-Concerned-Citizen-of-the-Year smiled in triumph and delivered the ultimate riposte:
"My daughter," she informed A-W-I proudly, "Is a vegetarian!"
Well, what can you say to that? Something involving carrots, probably, and a highly novel and entertaining use for them to boot. Not wishing to cause a scene, though, and find herself banned from the frozen veg and gossip magazines for life, A-W-I merely thanked her for her input and made it back to her car before the urge to commit an unspeakable act of violence overwhelmed her entirely.
I found this all quite fascinating, because it's the sort of thing which would never happen to me. Partly because I have spent a large part of my adult life cultivating the sort of facial expression and body-language which suggests that any person unwise enough to inflict their random opinions on me in a national Supermarket chain will be rendered into something which could be profitably sold under the brand name "Atora", but mostly, in this particular instance, because there exists a slightly less-than-zero probability that I would ever find myself involved in any activity for which the word "exercise" might be invoked as a description.
I did exercise once. Against my will. It was in High School - PE was compulsory on the grounds that it was a cheap way of keeping teenagers occupied character-building and fitness-enhancing. The theory, then as now, was that the effects of good, healthy, outdoor exercise during one's teenage years would stay with one for life, and in a way that has turned out to be true. The result of compulsory PE in High School as far as I was concerned was that I vowed never ever to have any truck with exercise in any form for the rest of my life, and during the course of that life, littered as it is with broken resolutions, unkept promises and degenerate backsliding, that vow stands out as a shining beacon of consistency and iron will.
The result of this, of course, is that at 50 I am totally unable to run more than a few yards without getting out of breath, but this was also true when I was 15, and had 3 hours of PE a week, walked 1.5 miles to school and back twice a day (home for lunch), walked 3 miles to the Sports Centre and back twice a week and swam up and down the bloody swimming pool for an hour while there, and general went everywhere by Shank's pony since there was no local bus service and this was back in the days when making teenagers lives difficult was seen as a sacred parental duty. Surely, with all this magical exercise I ought to have been whip-thin, cardio-vascularly enhanced and able to jog around a hockey pitch like a gazelle on steriods?
Well - no. If the genetic lottery has determined that you are one of nature's ambulatory slime-moulds, then no amount of exercise will alter that. This, of course, goes against the current received wisdom which states that exercise will make you thin, beautiful, sexy, able to leap tall buildings at a bound and able to think of a witty and cutting reply to smarmy busybodies in supermarkets who think it is somehow their business to stop you buying Mars Bars.
But for all her sweaty and empurpling exercises, A-W-I is no thinner and no more able to run away from hungry lions than me. She does, however, have immeasurably poorer taste in home furnishings and decor. I rest my case.
Now I have to go and disassemble my computer. I have failing memory. And the computer is malfunctioning too.