| Going nowhere |
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Following my operation, I have to walk - further than I ever have. The only problem is that it has been very cold. The last thing I want to do is to start sneezing or coughing and so I have been out and around in Coleshill, but not as often as I need to. And so I joined a gym in order that I could use its tread-mills. It is a very smart gym at a hotel and it has an octagonal swimming pool. This is not a lot of use to me at the moment, unless I can find an Edwardian all-in one swimming costume so as not to frighten people with my Frankenstein scar. As I use a tread-mill for periods of up to 45 minutes, it is useful to have something to distract me from what otherwise may be terminal boredom. The music coming from the sound system in the gym is by no means to my taste and so I take my i-Pod and stage my own protest against it by shutting it all out and listening instead to classical music through my ear pieces. Sibelius' 5th symphony, for example, is about the right length. The gym itself is on the first floor and from my vantage point on any of its 5 tread-mills, I have a good view over the pool. Down below there are people swimming up and down the pool and, more interestingly, there is usually a group of people doing aquarobics. The instructor is a young lady who demonstrates to her students from the area at the side of the pool the moves they should be making but at a speed, which if emulated by them, would induce cavitation around their limbs. And so they go at half speed or less until she gets to the slower exercises, when they all catch up. The music which blares out from her ghetto-blaster is the sort of sound I would expect to come from a crack dealer's car in Handsworth, and yet her students are all in their 70's and would obviously be more at home with Vera Lynn. Why are they there? Well let us say that they are virtually all the products of a lifetime of English breakfasts, but clearly think that by paying for membership of the fitness facility and then again for the aquarobics, they can avoid the terrible prospect of eating less. There is of course a clue as to the effectiveness of this regime - the instructor, despite her even more vigorous pool-side activities, is herself still of very ample proportions. Gyms though are strange places. I am in a room where there is a flotilla of rowing machines and an entire peleton of stationary bicycles. I am part of a line of people using the tread mills. Me, I'm just walking at a steady rate. The others are working so hard that they are shaking the floor of the gym. I don't really know why though, as none of us is going anywhere. |