’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.’
