3 (R)age

’Twas a beautiful sunny morning and Ma’am elected to get out of bed early, thereby screwing up my arrangements (which were no grander than watching Quatermass on DVD and pottering with one or two projects on the word processor) when she sent me off to Tesco alone. Much later, on my return with a week’s groceries and the daily garbage, aka a newspaper, she sat in the armchair scanning one of those alleged papers, a tabloid.

‘Look at this,’ she said suddenly and excitedly. ‘There’s a small treadmill and it’s only £60.’

Sitting at my computer workstation, contemplating the great questions of life, love the universe and everything, I found this a disturbing distraction. How was I supposed to arrive at a conclusion on the meaning of life, the existence of God, the calorific value of a sausage butty, when Ma’am persistently impinged on my mental, nose-picking?

‘We already have a treadmill,’ I told her. ‘It’s the one you have me working on.’

‘You need to lose some weight,’ she declared in tones that brooked no argument. It was a combination of voices: Margaret Thatcher speaking to the miners, Joyce Grenfell speaking to Sidney & George. Educational, insistent, bloody minded.

Instantly it called to mind an interview with my doctor some 10 years previously when he said exactly the same thing and arranged a prescription for health.

Put simply, for the price of a single prescription, about a fiver in those far off, balmy days when I was a 40-something, I could have 30 sessions at a local gym, usually costing a fiver a go, which meant a dramatic saving of £195.

A little logic would have told my GP that I could have saved the entire £200 by refusing the prescription. After all, a fiver is a fiver and if you don’t want what you’re paying for, it’s a fiver wasted. Ill-disposed to argue at the time, I accepted his offer and took the prescription along to my local, council owned and operated gym, where I was interviewed by a fitness “expert”. You’ll see why he’s in inverted commas in a moment.

He asked a shed load of questions about weight, diet, exercise and particular problems.

‘Having coughed up five quid for this, I’m recovering from open wallet surgery,’ I explained.

He took this as a joke, even though I was being serious and proceeded to explain that in his humble opinion I suffered from a lack of stamina.

‘And you needed to think about it to come to that conclusion?’ I demanded. ‘All you had to do was ask and I could have told you.’

‘What you need is as structured programme of exercise,’ he chortled enthusiastically. ‘We’ll start with the treadmill at walking pace. There’s nothing better than walking as gentle exercise, and,’ he stressed, ‘walking is completely safe?’

‘Really? Try walking down the inside lane of the M62 during the rush hour and see how safe it is then.’

He took me to the gym and introduced me to the various pieces of equipment, the rowing machine, exercise cycle, various weight lifting tackle, and the dreaded treadmill including its panel of buttons to control the speed.

The treadmills face a large wall of mirrors so that one could admire oneself as one plodded along.

On I get, start it up at a nice walking pace, looking at my alarming reflection in the mirror. Five and a half feet – around the waist so it appeared – dressed in baggy shorts a tatty T-shirt and cheap trainers, with its hair waving … goodbye to its head.

As I walked along, going nowhere, checking on the distance – 300 yards and I was already shagged out – a young woman got onto the treadmill next to me and began running at a pace I could never manage when I was in my prime: i.e. aged about 12.

This chick was gorgeous. Well shaped, well built with all the bits in all the right places and a pair of legs that would have looked great wrapped around my back. I would have committed murder for half an hour with this girl. She would have killed me but the undertaker would never have got the smile of my face.

I was so obsessed with surreptitiously watching this girl bounce along on the treadmill – and I do mean bounce – that I pressed the wrong button on my control pad. My conveyor belt speeded up. In a panic I jabbed the stop button, the thing ground to an immediate halt and I fell forward, twisting my ankle.

I went into that gym overweight and out of breath, I came out overweight, out of breath and walking on crutches.

It was that experience that put me off treadmills, and when Ma’am mentioned buying one, the nightmare came back to me and I blanched at the idea. What’s worse, these days, thanks to advancing arthritis, I walk with a stick, meaning a treadmill is even less attractive.

‘Tell me,’ I said in response to her enthusiasm, ‘does this treadmill, cheap as it is, have the necessary settings?’

‘Settings? What settings?’

‘You know. The speed control. It needs four settings for me.’

‘And what are they?’

‘Sprint, jog, walk and limp.’

I’ve been following Wayne Rooney and his broken 4th metatarsal.

As a football and Man U fanatic it interests me, but not to the point where it takes over the front pages, ousting such trivia as local elections, who’s screwing who in Parliament, cabinet reshuffles in the vain hope of staving off a pasting at the local elections, and the usual catalogue of rapes, murders and soap plots that seem to be the standard fodder of our tabloids. What does interest me is the description of his injury. Our Wayne, England’s sole hope of World Cup salvation, broke his 4th metatarsal. Shock, horror … er … what’s a metatarsal?

A couple of years back, when I was a mere stripling of 50-something, I tootled along to the doctor because I had been feeing a bit manky. He couldn’t fathom it but ran all the usual tests. No I wasn’t suffering from diabetes, no it wasn’t stress, yes I did smoke too much and yes, I was still 3 stones overweight, but none of these symptoms accounted for the malaise. Eventually, he took my blood pressure and registered 12.5 on the Richter scale. The meter read 212/115 and he said he couldn’t be certain, but it might be a record. He ordered time off work, complete rest, stay at home and be bored. No problem. Anything that kept me away from The Mill was all right by me.

For the next three weeks, I lounged around the house, enjoying full pay, doing sweet Francis, watching videos, watching makeover programmes, followed by auction programmes, followed by women’s programmes, followed by Richard and Judy. I pottered occasionally with the computer, writing bits and pieces here and there, and generally I was so bored, I took to calculating the approximate number of times I’d had sex since my first time at age 18, assuming an average of three times a week.

‘Do you realise,’ I said to Ma’am as we went to bed, ‘I’ve had nearly six thousand shags in my whole life.’

‘You’re weird you,’ she retorted. ‘Why don’t you work out the number of times you’ve been for a shit since you were born?’

‘About 41,000 times,’ I reported over breakfast the following morning, ‘balancing bouts of constipation with incidences of diarrhoea.’

Eventually, I got so bored, I went to bed one afternoon for an hour’s kip and woke up in need of relief, but since the woman across the street was out at work, I elected to go for a pee instead. I climbed out of bed, my right leg folded under me and something snapped.

Ma’am has this sixth sense about her. She instinctively knows when something is wrong … especially when I scream my head off in language that would make a marine blush. She plodded up the stairs, and found me writhing in agony on the bedroom carpet like a professional footballer who has tripped over the extended leg of an ant wearing opposition colours.

Since I was only wearing a pair of humungous, Homer Simpson Y-fronts and I couldn’t reach to clutch my injured foot, she could be forgiven for thinking that it was trapped wind.

‘If you’re going to fart,’ she said, ‘do it in the bathroom and do it quietly. I don’t want them next door sending for the Gas Board again.’

‘I’ve hurt my foot you silly cow,’ I shouted. ‘Call an ambulance.’

Mad Max, our faithful West Highland White, thought this looked like a fun game and brought a selection of toys to play with and not content with that tried rogering my leg which only caught him a clip round the ear, and Ma’am went downstairs. I continued to roll in agony until she came back.

‘Is the ambulance coming?’ I asked.

‘Shouldn’t think so. I haven’t rung them yet. I’m not having them coming in here while the room’s such a mess, so I’m hovering the carpet.’

This caused another argument before I eventually persuaded her that my injuries were genuine, in need of urgent attention and life threatening – her life if she didn’t dial 999 sharpish –whereupon, she went back down to call an ambulance and then continued to vacuum the front room.

While waiting for them, I decided to indulge in the relief I had already promised myself and through a blur of pain made my way to the khasi, drop my trolleys and sat. True to form, the ambulance man was a woman and she walked up the stairs just as I was enjoying a good crap. She backed off, I went through the motions (not literally of course) and they strapped me into a wheelchair and carried me out to the ambulance.

Some time later, after stopping for a smoke and a cuppa on the way, they wheeled me into A+E and left me to the various nurses, doctors, vagrants, football hooligans and general drunks you find hanging around the place on a Tuesday afternoon.

They X-rayed my right leg (the doctors and nurses, not drunks and hooligans) a doctor studied the plates and then told me I’d broken my foot.

Now I see the difference. I broke my foot, Wayne broke his 4th metatarsal. This begs many questions. If I’d been a 20 year old footballing superstar at the time of my near-death experience, would I have broken my lateral cuneiform? Is this simply another example of ageism that is ripe within our society?

Imagine the Queen wandering round the wards of Oldham Royal.

‘This is Mr Rooney, he’s twenty years old and suffering from a compound fracture of the 4th metatarsal.’

‘And will one recover from a compound fracture of the 4th metatarsal?’

‘The prognosis is good, Ma’am, and we expect him to make a speedy recovery in time for England to go out of the World Cup at the quarter final stage, as is customary.’

Move onto the next bed.

‘This is DW. A cantankerous 56 year old trucker with a big mouth and weak bladder.’

‘And what is wrong with him?’

‘He broke his foot.’

Move onto the next bed and a young chap of 19 suffering, ‘a subdural hematoma of the squama frontalis.’

‘And what is a subdural hematoma of the squama frontalis?’

‘A bump on the nut, Your Majesty.’

This is a clear case of age discrimination, and I feel compelled to write to my MP ... if ever I can find out who he is.

As an addenda to this tale, the Daily Mirror recently carried a tale that Sven (Goran Erikson for non-footballiing folk) was unable to get in touch with Wayne because the lad had left his mobile switched off.

I’m fairly easy going when I want. I’ll believe anything if you can persuade me. I can just about believe some of New Labour’s excuses for allowing the country to sink into a pit of utter lawlessness, I can almost accept that Ma’am’s new coat, which she did not need and which does not fit, was a bargain at £150, but a 20-year old leaving his mobile switched off? What will they have me believe in next? Santa Claus?