Woman. I haven’t even got fully through the door and she is explaining her determination to revolutionise the way my body works for me.
As she measures my vitals, she asks a few lifestyle questions. Despite being about nineteen, she is, with the annoying use of first-person plural, patronising in a way only people who work in gyms can be.
‘Now, Will. How much do we drink?’
‘Not as much as we used to. Say, a couple of glasses of wine a night, more at the weekend.’
‘…Mmm, right…we’re a heavy drinker. Let’s bend forward and breathe into this, there’s a good boy. And what about our diet, William? Do we eat a lot of dairy?’
‘Well, I have goat’s milk in my tea.’
‘Hardly going to keep our arteries unblocked now, is it, Will? But it’s a start, I suppose. Hold out our right arm. Good. What about exercise?’
‘Well, I’m joining a gym, aren’t I?’
While she fills in my induction form, she mutters and shakes her head gravely. While she makes me run for ten minutes on the treadmill, she looks off into the mid-distance as if pondering the recent expected but nonetheless tragic death of a close relative. While she takes my final pulse readings, she adopts the resigned expression of someone who knows they are fighting for the greater good, but that the fight is futile in a world full of people who just don’t know what is best for them.
It appears that if I don’t radically alter the way I’m going with my life, I will be dead within the year, obese in two and impotent before I hit thirty-five. I sign up for a month—‘No, I don’t want to waive the joining fee by signing up for a year. I don’t expect to be here in a year.’ ‘Oh, it’s not quite that bad, William.’ ‘No, I mean here in Finsbury Park’—and start the long jog home.
Denise wants ‘us’ back on Thursday to begin to take action to stop the rot to turn ‘our’ clock back to a new beginning.
Wednesday 3 August
I’m not sure we’re having enough sex. Think it might be a blip—my sore back hasn’t helped. Nor has the stupid arguing about Alex. But this is all the stuff of blips rather than trends. But what if it’s a trend rather than a blip?
Thursday 4 August
It’s just a blip. I’m sure it’s a blip.
Gym. I could feel my muscles actually doing some work. On Denise’s advice, I only did a low-impact workout. We need to build a foundation, she says. We need to reset our body, undo the damage, then launch into a hyperbolic curve of fitness and win the battle against self-loathing. Which sounds positive.
Shall go to the gym at least three times a week.
Friday 5 August
It’s not a blip. It’s a trend. Oh God. We have definitely gone down a notch. It’s not a big notch but it’s a notch. We have gone from having sex once every two days to having it twice every week and once during the weekend, which means we’ve dropped from a 50per cent probability of copulation each night to 42.86 per cent. If the weekend sex is skipped, as it was last weekend, then the percentage drops to just 28.57 per cent.
When we started going out, the probability was in the high nineties. On one particular night, it was 200 per cent, if you count the next morning. Two hundred per cent to 28.57 per cent in a few short months. If this is a trend and not a blip, then we will be sleeping in separate beds before the year is out.
Will go to the gym tomorrow.
Monday 8 August
It’s a blip.
Gym quite tiring. Couldn’t stop yawning on the rowing machine. Denise says it’s our body’s way of getting extra oxygen but we think it’s because we’re knackered from all the rampant sex. Hoorah.
Tuesday 9 August
A date has been set for my squash match with Alex. On the plus side, Isabel is delighted that we’re ‘getting on’. On the minus side, we aren’t. This is just another one of his schemes to make me look stupid.
Johnson says I have to beat him—my reputation as a man depends on it. Andy says I should take a chill
As she measures my vitals, she asks a few lifestyle questions. Despite being about nineteen, she is, with the annoying use of first-person plural, patronising in a way only people who work in gyms can be.
‘Now, Will. How much do we drink?’
‘Not as much as we used to. Say, a couple of glasses of wine a night, more at the weekend.’
‘…Mmm, right…we’re a heavy drinker. Let’s bend forward and breathe into this, there’s a good boy. And what about our diet, William? Do we eat a lot of dairy?’
‘Well, I have goat’s milk in my tea.’
‘Hardly going to keep our arteries unblocked now, is it, Will? But it’s a start, I suppose. Hold out our right arm. Good. What about exercise?’
‘Well, I’m joining a gym, aren’t I?’
While she fills in my induction form, she mutters and shakes her head gravely. While she makes me run for ten minutes on the treadmill, she looks off into the mid-distance as if pondering the recent expected but nonetheless tragic death of a close relative. While she takes my final pulse readings, she adopts the resigned expression of someone who knows they are fighting for the greater good, but that the fight is futile in a world full of people who just don’t know what is best for them.
It appears that if I don’t radically alter the way I’m going with my life, I will be dead within the year, obese in two and impotent before I hit thirty-five. I sign up for a month—‘No, I don’t want to waive the joining fee by signing up for a year. I don’t expect to be here in a year.’ ‘Oh, it’s not quite that bad, William.’ ‘No, I mean here in Finsbury Park’—and start the long jog home.
Denise wants ‘us’ back on Thursday to begin to take action to stop the rot to turn ‘our’ clock back to a new beginning.
Wednesday 3 August
I’m not sure we’re having enough sex. Think it might be a blip—my sore back hasn’t helped. Nor has the stupid arguing about Alex. But this is all the stuff of blips rather than trends. But what if it’s a trend rather than a blip?
Thursday 4 August
It’s just a blip. I’m sure it’s a blip.
Gym. I could feel my muscles actually doing some work. On Denise’s advice, I only did a low-impact workout. We need to build a foundation, she says. We need to reset our body, undo the damage, then launch into a hyperbolic curve of fitness and win the battle against self-loathing. Which sounds positive.
Shall go to the gym at least three times a week.
Friday 5 August
It’s not a blip. It’s a trend. Oh God. We have definitely gone down a notch. It’s not a big notch but it’s a notch. We have gone from having sex once every two days to having it twice every week and once during the weekend, which means we’ve dropped from a 50per cent probability of copulation each night to 42.86 per cent. If the weekend sex is skipped, as it was last weekend, then the percentage drops to just 28.57 per cent.
When we started going out, the probability was in the high nineties. On one particular night, it was 200 per cent, if you count the next morning. Two hundred per cent to 28.57 per cent in a few short months. If this is a trend and not a blip, then we will be sleeping in separate beds before the year is out.
Will go to the gym tomorrow.
Monday 8 August
It’s a blip.
Gym quite tiring. Couldn’t stop yawning on the rowing machine. Denise says it’s our body’s way of getting extra oxygen but we think it’s because we’re knackered from all the rampant sex. Hoorah.
Tuesday 9 August
A date has been set for my squash match with Alex. On the plus side, Isabel is delighted that we’re ‘getting on’. On the minus side, we aren’t. This is just another one of his schemes to make me look stupid.
Johnson says I have to beat him—my reputation as a man depends on it. Andy says I should take a chill
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