Seeds, nuts & raisins look the same whether going in an orifice or coming out of one
A big day today. I managed 10k, which let me tell you is a lot of circuits round the park. But I had a new playlist on my iPhone so I was very happy.
Now that's actually the question that everyone always asks 'What's your playlist' or 'What's on your iPhone when you run?'. Well that's a lie. The question I'm most asked is 'Ngggh, Eaten many seeds today spazzo?' or the more charming 'You know it wont last don't you? Once a fatty, always a fatty'.
But I digress. I realised that there is real enjoyment by seeing what my lovely shuffle function will throw up next. My music taste is eclectic if nothing else. I've just replaced my old playlist full of the Glee soundtrack and Michael Jackson, Madonna and The Cardigans with a raft of new tracks.
I can heartily recommend 'American Anthems', a quite brilliant mix of songs perfect for running. In my mind, there is no better group for supplying marvellous songs for a bit of a workout than Survivor. We all know the Rocky IV soundtrack, and much as I try and emulate Sly I don't have any heavy carts to drag up a hill, or large trees that have happened to fall down. But they do seem to create perfect uptempo songs for running or walking a bit briskly. My particular favourite is American Heartbeat. Listen to it now and see what you think:
But I'd love to say that my playlist is full of cool and trendy songs. But in the space of an hour I listened to:
Debbie Gibson
Black Eyed Peas
Cheryl Cole
Gwen Stefani
Survivor
John Secada
Huey Lewis & The News
Rhianna
So I'm happy with my choices, and never know if I'm going to be listening to some cheesy and dodgy 80s song or some epic rock masterpiece. It's all the fun of the shuffle.
If anyone has any good recommendations, then I'm always happy to hear.
They're everywhere. We've all met them and seen them and can't help staring. Some people like to call them Strangers. I once read a quote from some famous bloke who stated 'A stranger is a friend I haven't met yet'. When i was younger, I thought this was clever and true, now I realise it's just bollocks. For sure I am probably a grumpy old man, but for me the term strangers is a bit of a giveaway - it has the word Strange plonked in the middle. If we were meant to make friends with everyone then surely a better term would be 'Chumers', then you'd think - oh yes look at that Chumer, he could be a good friend or chum of mine I think.
But instead, we look at people and think, that Stranger is very weird. And very strange. A prime example today is during my extended walk I passed a young man running on the spot, a few minutes later he passed me doing high kick running like John Cleese a la Ministry of Silly Walks (Incidentally, when I was a young 'un I had a massive poster of this up on my wall, not sad at all). But that's not the weird part. A bit further ahead he started to do star jumps. Still not fully weird.
Then he started to do what I can only describe as 'crab running' he began running sideways, quite fast.
Now I'm not an expert, but I don't think there's any sport where running sideways fast is essential or important. To make matters worse, he was wearing bright blue jogging pants and a bright orange vest. Total weird, hence why I didn't go up to him and say 'Wow, I love your crab running style, can we be chums?'.
In fact, I don't feel the need to make any more friends ever. I've come to the point in my life where if you're not a friend of mine now, you're probably never likely to be. Quite cruel I know, and I'm not discounting a few possibleacquaintances, no doubt a few contacts with new people but no more actual friends. I mean how many do you need? I'm not talking about facebook friends either. Don't get me started on facebook and how people think they're suddenly mega popular because they have 500+ fb friends, but then they need reminding when it's your birthday so they can post the obligatory congrat message on your wall. Don't get me wrong, fb has a great place and I've been in contact with many old friends and colleagues, and people who I've lost touch with. But it's also thrown a few people my way that I've actually had to go 'Who are they? Am I meant to know them?'.
By now, you no doubt think I'm some grumpy bloke who hates everyone. Well you've pretty much hit the nail on the head there. That's probably why I'm called Gary Poppins by my friends. I love spending time with kids, you can't go wrong with kids. If it's a boy you can run around shooting each other, if it's a girl then you can let her paint your nails and talk about how dishy Troy is from HSM, and if you're faced with a toddler then simple facial expressions generally keep them amused for ages. You know where you are with kids. You don't have to pretend to be nice, you can just make funny noises or sing badly and run around in random circles.
But adults - well you have to be nice to them. You have to conform to the world of 'small talk'. I detest small talk. How many times can you ask people what they do for a living, talk about the weather, where they're going on holiday etc. etc etc... The list is endless. I can't be arsed. I'll let my lovely sociable wife do all the talking, and I'll just stand in the background looking grumpy or go off and play cowboys and spacemen with the nearest kid I can find.
The journey i used to hate more than anything was the dreaded train journey. Don't get me wrong, I don't think anyone jumps gaily in the morning going 'Yippee, I'm off to work and time to catch the train. What fun!'. But I just hated the claustrophobia of being in such close quarters with so many weirdos, I mean strangers. It's not normal for us all to be so close together, hence why everyone always looks so grumpy. We all think everyone else is weird and we're the only normal ones. Come on admit it, how many times have you been in a busy train carriage when you've just thought 'Why am I in this carriage with the most grotesque weirdos on the planet'. They've either got bad breath, terrible BO, annoying social mannerisms - the list goes on.
Talking of busy train carriages, it's a great opportunity to post one of the funniest clips I've ever seen on Youtube. At the least it will make you feel better the next time you get on a slightly packed tube train.. it could be worse. A lot worse.
We are all addicted to something. Whether it's the latest episode of Corrie or Eastenders that YOU CANNOT MISS, or crack cocaine (not sure which is worse) we all have an addiction.
I've had many addictions in my lifetime, too many to actually list fully here, but although I know how addicted I've been to many things, it's funny how few people would admit to being an addict. I would say it's actually impossible to avoid being addicted to something, as we live in such a commercially focussed advertising-led society that being addicted to something is commonplace.
There are many addictions that are ok and would not interfere with your day-to-day life in any way. But there are many hidden addictions that we just don't realise we're hooked on.
It goes without saying that I've got an addictive personality, as from a young age I have been addicted to staring at women's vee-jay-yays and mammary glands. Actually that's one addiction that I hope will never leave me. But there are many others that I picked up along the way that were really not so welcome.
I have what can be described as a sweet tooth, so my addiction to sugar goes back to my childhood when me and my sister used to go out and walk our dog on the strict instruction not to buy sweets from Whelams (our beloved sweet shop now long gone in Barkingside). Whelams was a kids paradise. It was a proper old school sweet shop, where sweets were sold loose by the 1/4 lb and you could buy 1/2p, 1p and 2p sweets out of small cardboard boxes next to the till. This was the proper way of buying sweets in a totally unhealthy manner, open to lots of kids grubby hands rummaging in the boxes to find the last cola bottle.
We often came up with inventive ways of disguising our sugar eating habits. I loved shrimps and bananas and milk bottles and sherbet dib dabs, not forgetting the chocolate milk drops with hundreds and thousands. Avoiding the tell tale signs of our sweet eating was an ongoing battle with our parents. They now tell us that they always knew that what we were doing, but we used to go to great lengths to disguise our secret sweet eating. My favourite trick was putting our secret stash of sweets in a carrier bag and throwing it over our back fence to be collected later when the coast was clear. We hid bags in the porch, in secret pockets in our coats and even up our poor dogs arsehole.
My point is, that as soon as my Dad said 'You can't have sweets', that set off an alarm in my head which automatically went 'My Dad said I can't have sweets, therefore I WILL HAVE SWEETS AND HIDE THEM'. It got to the point that Dad often smelt our breath for sweets, so we cunningly also bought a packet of polo's or borrowed his extra strong mints to make our eyes water and breath smell fresh before the inspection (we of course didn't realise that having breath smelling of mint was a complete giveway really).
I'm not saying our Dad was a bit of a hard taskmaster (I'm often called Victorian Dad in jest and I know who I take after...), but not only was he often on sweet inspection, but he insisted on us getting a pay phone for our house as my sister used the phone too much. So we had one of those phones installed with a lock and you had to insert a 10p, 20p or 50p. It had pips on the line and everything. We of course found the key and kept on emptying it, so he never had more than £10 in the box no matter how much the bill was.
Anyway, I digress. My point is not that my father was a secret sociopath, in fact he was really quite harmless and easygoing. The point is that my addiction to sugar started at a very yo
ung age, and it shows you how hard it is for any of us to be free from these addictions.
I remember at school I was very proud as I could drink a can of Quatro (a bit like Lilt but contained around 30% more sugar and less fruit) in under 3 seconds. Yes a 330ml can of Quatro in under 3 seconds. I literally pulled the top off and poured it down my throat
. Why I thought this was clever I'll never know. A friend at school (Obby was his nickname, and I would love to know if people still call him that) discovered a cola called Jump Cola, which proudly had 5 times the caffeine and sugar of regular coke. It was eventually banned in this country, but not before we'd both gone through a few thousand litres of the stuff as we danced atop the roofs of the local houses naked whilst screaming 'WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS' (RIP Ron Pickering). Well it wasn't that bad, but I definitely had a buzz during a few Geography lessons (probably why I always get a bit of a euphoric rush when someone starts talking about contour lines and ordinance survey maps).
I was a total drug user at school, and it must have been terrible for my parents to know their son was such a druggie. My particular low light (or highlight depending on how you view it) was when I got called into the headmaster's office for drug taking. There was a big furore as there were a number of suspect clear bags of white powder that were confiscated and me along with 3 other boys were summoned to talk about this.
At the time there was a lot of fuss made of this, but we could never understand the problem. Why was it a issue to empty the contents of a sherbert dip into a small see through bag and then hide them in our school bags? We knew of course the connotations of this, and at breaktime we took great delight in sneaking into the bushes and sniffing or sucking on these small bags of sherbert.
Once the deputy head and headmaster found out that they were dealing with a perfectly legal ring of sherbert addicts and not speed or cocaine, they did thaw somewhat. But we tried to stay straightfaced as we got a stern talking to about the problems of drug use, although sniffing or sucking sherbert was probably about as lame as you could ever get. That's how hard our Grammar school was. Needless to say I was never part of the cool kids, this was as close to being cool as I ever got, apart from when I was selling 2nd hand Razzles, Mayfair and Escort behind the bike sheds for 20p a pop, but that's another story.
But although at the time we laughed about it, I was addicted - I just didn't realise it.
So it was clear that my fascination and addiction to sugar would continue for many years. I'm not saying I'm totally free from my addiction now, but I can proudly stand up and say my name is Gary Mazin and I was addicted to sugar, and sniffed sherbert dips and drank a can of Quatro in under 3 seconds (I was that close to contacting Norris McWhirter, so proud was I of that accolade), but I'm working on it, I'm handling it. As the kids in Grange Hill always told us 'Just Say No'.
And it was all going so well. I've woken today with the dreaded mancold. Which is a very different illness from the more traditional cold, which affects a lot of people. Mancold is terrible, it makes the Ebola virus look like a slight temperature.
It is clear to see when mancold is starting as generally you can hear the moans from miles around.
Hopefully it won't get worse, but after my much shorter than usual walk today I nearly collapsed on the bed and couldn't move for 20 minutes. IT'S THAT BAD.
When you've been with your partner for many years, you learn to live with and understand each others ailments and symptoms and my darling wife knew straight away that I have the onset of mancold. She hasted a swift retreat and will quite rightly tread carefully for the rest of the day.
On a more positive note, I've got a lovely warming soup to look forward to later, and can snuggle up on my relaxo chair with my red fleece (TM), tracky bottoms and watch trash TV...so just like every other night then!
Hopefully normal service will resume very quickly. Apart from the mancold I was feeling great and enjoying the new exercise and food regime, so hopefully I'll be back to fighting fit status in no time at all.
Beardwatch: Not sure whether to shave or not, as I'm now in the stage of going from developed near beard to scraggly tramp beard. I know that most people hate it, but now I'v
e got over the itchy stage I quite like it, even if it does make me look 50. Also I now look like Bernard Bresslaw from Carry on up the Khyber, so it's not all bad (turban not included).
Simon Bates: Please be aware that the following article contains language of a delicate nature, which could offend people of a nervous disposition. It also contains a number of sexual swearwords that are nastier than Poo-bum, Bogie-breath and Vadge-face.
I now have a new nickname: ‘Reverend Food’, which makes me realise that I’ve turned into my worst nightmare.. a terrible preachy annoying person who looks disdainfully at people who don't believe in what they believe in. It’s terrible as I know how annoying these people can be.
So I warn anyone who now comes into contact with me, that you’ll be getting a sermon. I can’t help it, and that makes it all the worse. Fortunately there are a few people who I can talk with endlessly about this, and I’m probably boring them as well.
The thing is, that since I’ve had my enlightenment and had my ungodly visitation by the crap food god I have been de-brainwashed. Much like someone who discovers god and wants to tell everyone about it, I’m the same – but about food and exercise. Much as I realise I’m like those annoying religious preachy types of people, I still hate those feckers, at least I’m self-aware at how annoying I’ve become. So next time you’re about to eat a massive bowl of spaghetti bolognase with pasta think of me screaming ‘No, White refined pasta, Terrible pasta sauce full of sugar + salt, Red meat – 2nd time this week..Nooooooooo’ and then enjoy it.
I know that I will not always be like this, but I see this process very much like someone finding god for the first time, or anything that can have devotees. Even though we all know that there is no white-beardy entity looking over us, but I do think that Monty Pyhton’s Life of Brian was pure fact, it has to be.
So initially you have the ‘enlightenment stage’ and euphoria of discovering all of this undiscovered knowledge that up to now has been missing from your life. You are amazed that you haven’t seen this before. There's often a glow about you, and people notice that you're going through some form of change. They often say things like 'What have you done with the real XXXX, but whatever it is, you're looking great.'
Then the second stage, which is ‘information gathering’. Once you try and find out as much as you can, you suddenly feel like you know more on the subject than anyone else that has ever existed, and that what you think and say is 150% correct (yes 50% more than is actually physically possible). The next stage is the one that everyone else dreads and fears, ‘sharing and caring’. This is when you think with all this knowledge and power (because knowledge is POWER of course in your weird twisted little mind) you can help save mankind. During this stage, anyone unfortunate enough to come within spitting distance of you will have to endure a 30 minute sermon on your specialist subject, irrespective of whether they have any interest whatsoever. You also get a bit annoyed when people suddenly get up and leave or get a glazed look on their face.
You now come to a fork in the road of your journey. This leads down two paths – one leads to the stage called ‘awakening’, the other to the more dangerous route called ‘arseholified’. They’re probably self explanatory but just to embellish. ‘Awakening’ allows you to take a step back and realise that actually you’re being a cock and can’t in fact change the world, and actually you do still quite like red meat, and the occasional steak and chips is not going to kill you. You also think back with embarrassment on all the cringeworthy conversations, and how you’ve been a complete twat. You still believe in what you’ve been saying, but now realise that not everyone thinks the same as you, and actually that’s ok. You can sometimes slip up, and appear to be in ‘sharing and caring’ or the ‘arsehole’ stages, but this doesn’t last long and you can generally snap out of it.
For those unfortunate not to discover ‘awakenings’, they find themselves in the irredeemable ‘arseholified’ stage. This is generally irreversible, and you can tell if you’re in this stage if people avoid you on the street, and if you suddenly find you have no friends. You think this is ok, as you can find new friends and people who believe in what you’re saying. I’ve known a few people who have gone down the ‘arseholified’ path, and it is a sad sight indeed.
So much so that some have been so ‘arseholefied’ that they’ve literally disappeared up their own one, due to the nastiness of the ‘arseholicness’ that has infected them. Sometimes, people that have gone down this route can end up on TV and become ‘famous’. Some you may have heard of include Anthony ‘GingerC*ntFace’ Worrell Thompson, Lenny ‘Premier Arshehole’ Henry, Andrew ‘Chocolate Starfish Starman’ Stone and of course Gillian ‘Hunchback Dogface’ McKeith (see previous post for reference). In fact there are too many to quote, and I think we all know a number of people that have suffered and still suffering from this ‘arsheholic’ pathway.
I only hope that we can try and help these people, and make them see the light. I am thankful that at the moment I’ve not gone down the route of the ‘arsehole’ stage, but that probably just means I’m a bit of a cock, so I apologise in advance if you’ve suffered from my enlightenment.
Today I played a game whilst walking, to pass the time. So for every person I walked past I would decide in my head what famous person they most look like. The results were rather disappointing:
Jeremy Spake from Airport or something (A large man with a goatee and glasses)
Krishnan Guru-Murthy (A quite fit looking Asian man with glasses walking his dog)
The Dulux Dog (much as I tried I couldn’t get the owner to look like anyone, apart from perhaps Mary Whitehouse)
Charlie Dimmock (A large ginger woman with a massive arse)
Mr Pink, Mr White, Mr Brown & Mr Blue if they’d lived to be 100 (A group of old guys all wearing the same tracksuits walking their dogs)
So in a nutshell, if you’re looking for some lookalike action – do not come to Clayhall Park. Unless you want to meet an extremely sweaty Bernard Bresslaw lookalikey.
Except I don’t look like him at the moment. I know, strange as it may seem, but I have a heavy beard growth. I’m not growing a beard as such, just choosing not to shave. Which conveniently brings me onto the subject of facial hair. It does seem that the subject of facial hair elicits an either love it or hate it philosophy. I actually think my face with hair suits me. I’m fortunate that I can get a full growth and in the space of a couple of days, look like Bigfoot. I know not all men are so fortunate.
One thing that I never understand though is men who choose to grow a moustache. I don’t think anyone looks good with one. If you think about it, what exactly is the benefit of having a moustache? If you grow a full beard you don’t have to shave, if you grow a goatee then you’re doing it so that you can try and hide a double chin, or have people call you goatee wanker or such like.
But what are the benefits of a moustache? I can’t actually think of any. You still have to shave, and generally you look like you’ve got a dead caterpillar above your lip. And if you’re a proper idiot then you’ll go for the Seaman look and accessorise your moustache with a rat tail. Nice. I saw him recently on a World Cup show and he’s clean shaven with a short haircut and he looks younger than he did 15 years ago.
Anyone that can give me a benefit of having a moustache, please post a message, as I really would love to know. Do remember that moustaches can be grown by both sexes. There’s nothing funnier or more taboo than a ladytache. You’re not allowed to point, or laugh. The only option is to ignore it. I do wonder whether they’re actually proud of the amount of hair that can be grown above their top lip. It is quite impressive when you meet a woman with a more substantial growth than most teenage boys can manage.
I know that this is one of the last taboo subjects along with necrophilia and bestiality, that we’re not allowed to discuss, but I think it’s time to say that women with moustaches should be proud, that’s an impressive ladytache my friend. I’m very impressed. At least you’ll know what to buy them for xmas, Gillette razors are dirt cheap.
I can't run. Never have been able to, and I realise that now I'm trying to - I have zero ability on making my legs move in the right way to make myself run.
I can walk briskly, jog a slow pace, even trot and skip - but if I need to go any faster than slow jog - my rubbish co-ordination kicks in and I just end up flapping about, huffing and puffing until I realise that I can't actually run.
To give you an example, to get my proper walking/running shoes I went to a specialist shop where they test your running style, so that they can see what shoes you need. I was so inept at running, that I nearly fell off the running machine after 3 seconds. Fortunately the test only lasted for about 10 seconds, as any longer and I would have ended up arse over tit.
I'm hoping that as my fitness improves, I can magically turn into the Roadrunner and start running everywhere. But when I say that I run/walked 4 miles today, what I mean to say is that I walked briskly for most of it, and then attempted a bit of jogging and run for 30 second intervals before my legs and arms just asked my brain what the hell they were meant to be doing and stopped working.
During my walk, I was thinking about how faddy all this nutrition and exercise malarky is, I mean every year there's a new diet or new exercise, that we should be doing or new food that we should be eating. I feel sorry for Gillian McKeith, that wizened old crochety hunchback of a so-called nutritionist that was around a few years back. She was the sickest looking women on TV, yet was telling people you are what you eat. Well she obviously ate grit and gravel and drank horse piss then.
No-one liked her, did they? She was horrible. Who in their right mind thinks its ok to examine people’s poo. At what stage in your nutrition course do you ask the instructor ‘When do we start talking about poo?’. She loved the poo examining a bit too much. The one thing I always think is how do you get the poo in the Tupperware boxes? Do you have to squat on it and hope that something lands in it, or do you have to physically pick up your own poo and place it in the box.
Neither way seems particularly enticing; no wonder all the fatties she helped looked like they wanted to smack her very hard in the face, she’d just made them poo in a Tupperware box that they’d never be able to use again.
But now she’s resigned to the dole queue, and her and Michelle McManus can talk of their 10 minutes of fame together, let’s just hope that no-one decided to give her a programme again. I’m just hoping that that horrible creature Gok Wan is resigned to the TV dustbin very soon
too.
If you’re talking of bringing back old celebrities then Johnny Ball should be in the front of the queue. He was my idol,and if he’d presented ‘You Are What You Eat’ I would have listened, because he’d probably had made it into a funny maths problem, or giving you some interesting facts about fat people. He would have dressed up in a fat suit for larks, and no doubt had made all the science part fun and interesting. He would have said ‘Think of a number between 1 and 100, now times it by 20 - that’s how fat you are’. Johnny Ball would never have examined people’s poo.
A woman, holding up my eating trousers, yesterday.
I absolutely love The Biggest Loser. Particularly the American one, as I haven’t actually seen the UK one. It's so, so, well so American. For those who haven't seen this marvellous piece of TV entertainment (Sky 1 and Sky real lives) it's basically a gameshow where they get a range of the fattest people you have ever seen (largest was just under half a tonne - same as a baby elephant!) and put them on this intensive 12 week course of extreme exercise and diet and challenges. Each week someone gets eliminated, and the winner is the last one left who has lost the most weight. By the end the transformations are amazing, some go from being an overweight hefer to an anorexic waif, well the winner does get $500.000 so you can see why they do it.
Much as I love the show, and particularly the two trainers who keep the contestants on their toes and sweating like buckets (Bob and Gillian), I don’t really agree with the final product. The idea is there, and they do take on extreme cases and generally people do lose a lot of weight and change their lives, as well as go through a lot of psychological issues. But it seems that the final result is so extreme that I’ve heard that a lot of the contestants go back to being fat again.
It’s so hilariously over the top, and the constant product placement is just cringeworthy. Here’s one example:
Bob: Hey Gillian, I see you’re chewing gum.
Gillian: Yes Bob, I’m chewing Wrigley’s new sugar free gum.
Bob: Did you know chewing gum after a meal helps you digest the food quicker and keeps your hunger pains at bay.
Gillian: Yes Bob, especially if you use Wrigley’s new sugar free gum.
Bob: Yes. Wrigley’s sugar free gum, which is new, and great is the BEST.
Gillian & Bob: Ha ha ha, it’s the BEST.
But anything that encourages people to eat healthily and exercise is not a bad thing at all. My favourite part of the show is the ‘transofrmation’ at the end of the episode where they always hold up a pair of old trousers and drop them to show how much weight they’ve lost.
That’s my main aim for changing my diet and exercising, I want to be the person dropping my trousers and smiling vacantly. Although taking that sentence out of context, I could be arrested for doing that.
During the walk today, the only other people of note in the park were this teenage couple snogging on a park bench. We all remember those days, many many many years ago.
I remember the early days of my courting years, oh how I enjoyed the park then. It's a natural part of any courtship for a teenager. Where else can you go and get some good snogging practice in? Another wonderful reason why parks are marvellous.
It's a funny thing though. As a grown up mature married adult, we know that snogging in public is NOT ALLOWED. Yet seeing those two kids, clearly thinking they're in love embracing on the park bench, made me nostalgic for my early courting days and then I remembered all the uncertainty, awkwardness and disappointment. Actually I don't ever remember being the one on the bench, I was always the one sat in my room playing Sensible Soccer with no female interaction.
I hope the world never becomes too cynical that two young loves can't snog openly in public on park bench.
So naturally I decided to do my warm down exercises of leg squats and thrusts, just in front of the bench. I was impressed they lasted 45 seconds. They should have been in school anyway. Dirty stopouts.
I went for a 5 mile walk today, 5.6 miles actually, according to my handy iPhone pedometer app.
Half way through the walk I desperately needed a wee, as you do. So walked to the toilets in the park, only to discover they were all locked. What is the point of having public toilets in the park that are locked? So I had to hide behind a bush, and fortunately it wasn't a number two. That would have been embarrassing.
They also had a disabled toilet there, with the special lock. Has anyone seen these? They're fitted on all public toilets, generally all disabled toilets have a lock that requires a special key. To get this key you obviously need to be disabled and apply to the local council. My mum got one for my Dad and it's the most hilarious thing ever. it's like a key used in Alice in Wonderland on a long chain.
I don't mean to be rude, but as a fully fledged DISABLED MAN, I would prefer to wee in a bush than carry around a 6ft chain with a clomping big key on it. More sterling work from the councils as per usual.
And rather more hilariously the keyhole for the disabled toilet in the park was around 5 feet off the ground. So any wheelchair user, would need to have seriously long arms, or would also find themselves weeing by a bush.
As I passed back to the path, I noticed that there was a queue forming by the ladies wee bush, poor ladies even need to queue to do a wee in a bush. I do feel for sorry for women as there always seems to be queues for ladies loo's everywhere., all that queueing just to do a quick 30 second wee, how tiresome. But then I suppose they could just play with their bosoms whilst waiting, so every cloud...
Apart from the wee in the bushes it was a fairly innocuous run, there were a lot less walkers and runners, and I missed the old shouty bloke egging me on.
There was the fittest and hottest man (TM) running around the park, who made me look like the fat weakling I am. He had muscles on muscles, and during my circuit of the park (around .8 of a mile FYI) he passed me 3 times. Talk about making me feel inferior. But not to fear, I saw him walking to the toilet on his way out, so sneakily posted him weeing behind a bush and posted it on youtube.
I never realised that there’s clearly some form of social etiquette that I’m not accustomed to, whilst running/walking in my local park.
It seems simply getting your running shoes on and going to the park is not as simple as you may think. So be warned.
How can this be you may well inquire. Well I’ll tell you.
Firstly on entering the park from one of 6 exits, it seems there may be a certain way you should be running. Clockwise or Anti-Clockwise? I only discovered this as I was briskly passing my 20th person in the opposite direction. I looked around confused, was there some secret sign that I had not seen, is there some arrows on the ground that I’d stupidly missed? Or was it simply a clever psychological trick that all these seasoned runners play on the ‘newbies’.
‘Hey, here’s another one. Let’s all do the running in the opposite direction trick to them, that’ll totally feck them up.’
But do you know. I don’t care. I’ll run whatever direction I want to. If I’m meant to be going in one direction, then call me a maverick. I set trends – I don’t follow them.
But there’s more...
I’m also unsure as to whether you’re meant to nod, say ‘Morning’, or totally ignore the other runners and walkers as you pass them. Perhaps that’s why everyone else goes in the same direction – so they don’t actually have to do the awkward passing someone on the opposite way like I do.
So far it seems I’m on nodding terms with 10 people. 2 people I’ve acknowledged with a ‘Morning’ and one old guy who is obviously just in the park to make friends shouts ‘Keep it Up’, ‘Go on Son’ and other positive remarks as I pass him.
I will let you know as I discover more on this fascinating new social etiquette that has so far passed me by.
I'm not on a DIET. I'm not. I'm CHANGING my diet. There's a big difference. Also - I'm actually exercising. That means I’m not just sitting on my lazyboy chair on in my loft, I’m actually walking/running. So the plan is as follows:
Find alternatives for all processed junk food from my diet, including sweeteners, pepsi max, processed sugar.
Cut out smoking and alcohol. This is actually pretty easy as I hardly drink now.
Aim to jog/run for 30 minutes without stopping and run in a 5k and 10k charity run.
That’s it really. I’m not aiming to lose a certain amount of weight, obviously that is a factor, hence the photo updates of my big belly. But I just want to start looking and feeling healthier.
So this is going to be my daily or semi-daily diary. This is where I’ll post all my day to day musings of what I’ve discovered about trying to improve my lifestyle. And here is a warning for the more squeamish, here’s a photo of me TOPLESS. Let’s see if I can get rid of that big blubber belly shall we.
. Why I thought this was clever I'll never know. A friend at school (Obby was his nickname, and I would love to know if people still call him that) discovered a cola called Jump Cola, which proudly had 5 times the caffeine and sugar of regular coke. It was eventually banned in this country, but not before we'd both gone through a few thousand litres of the stuff as we danced atop the roofs of the local houses naked whilst screaming 'WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS' (RIP Ron Pickering). Well it wasn't that bad, but I definitely had a buzz during a few Geography lessons (probably why I always get a bit of a euphoric rush when someone starts talking about contour lines and ordinance survey maps).
