Wednesday November 21st – Exercise and Rewards

Well, as predicted, As You Like It was a bag of pants.  The ninjas were in it, but only for the first few minutes, and to be honest they were second rate ninjas, and they never stood a chance against the booming heartiness of Brian Blessed (who was so hearty he was in it twice).  Brian Blessed was a warlord who was in charge of the ninjas.  Clearly even the director had realised that trying to convince a cinema full of people that Brian was a suitable shape for a ninja would never have worked.  The ninjas that did make the grade would frankly never have got a job in any self respecting Crouching Tiger type film.  Perhaps they were hired from the; ‘Rest Home for Wrinkly Ninjas’ at a discount rate.  Who knows?  All I know is that they didn’t so much fly as plummet, and they were a bit crap.

 Add to this (as predicted in yesterday’s entry), the usual cross dressing shenanigans, where anyone who had eyes would clearly have worked out in the first five minutes, that even the prettiest of boys does not have a heaving bosom a twenty four inch waist and the ability to both mince and sway at the same time (although I haven’t seen the Bangkok Lady Boys, so am prepared to be put right on this matter), and it was all fairly disastrous.  My only explanation for such wilful and terrible displays of ignorance on the part of the characters, were that perhaps there was a lot of lead in the water and they were all suffering from an early onset of heavy metal poisoning/dementia.  Equally valid would be the explanation that Vision Express doesn’t have a branch in the Forest of Arden.  Talking of which, more like a layby in Dorking and most certainly not feudal Japan.

Despite this, it wasn’t as bad as Beowulf (which may become the measuring stick of crapness in films for ever more – The Beowulf Scale), because we were able to stay for the entire duration of the film, even though we were forced to both tut and raise our eyebrows on several occasions.  We have however agreed that we were pleased with our experiment and that we are laying up a good store of things to be very pretentious about in later years.

It’s unlikely that we’re going to be late bloomers and surprise everyone by becoming ravishing supermodels and winning a modelling contract with Marks & Spencers, like mad old Twiggy. It’s unlikely that we’d get a job modelling anything anywhere, even in the Damart catalogue, so we must do something to make old age more interesting and give us a fighting chance of being further down the list of selective euthanasia than others.  I’m sure it won’t be too long before the government start culling pensioners, battering them with tins of Spam while they’re waiting in line on pension day.  They won’t be able to escape because of those horrible makeshift lanes they create now to contain queues, but also because all the fudgies (a name some friends came up with for elderly people once when we were on holiday in Devon.  There was a particular garden where they congregated which got renamed Fudgies World), are so confused trying to remember their pin numbers to get the damn money out, they won’t know what’s happening until too late.  It’s all part of the master plan.

Intellectual superiority is the raft to which we are clinging.  There isn’t anything else left, not on my part anyway.  I can cook on a good day, but on a bad day I thank my lucky stars that there’s a very good chip shop nearby, and I have no other saleable skills apart from rambling on inanely, and all old people can do that, I just happen to have been blessed earlier on in life.  Andrea might actually do alright, because she’s a lot more practical than me, and can drive a tractor and make gates.  I shall stand next to her when the cull begins and hope that I become more attractive by association.

My sell by date has definitely gone, along with any elasticity and/or muscle tone I may once have had.  Three children, too many late nights and a lifetime love affair with Mr. Kipling’s French Fancies have seen to that.  I look in the mirror now, and see a woman who resembles a badly deflated party balloon with hair.  My posture is so bad, due to exhaustion that I praise the Lord every time I make it home after an outing without being chased by the local dog catcher.  I do have a wardrobe full of nice clothes and a bathroom cupboard full of very expensive beauty products.  I use them about once every six months, when I’m awake enough to make sure I put depilatory cream on my legs rather than mistaking it for Elizabeth Arden 8 Hour Face Cream, only to wake up looking like Nikki Lauda.  After a long day at the coal face I don’t have the will power left to do four hours of power aerobics and an intensive session with the St Tropez tanning cream.  It’s all I can do to find matching pyjama tops and bottoms and get all the buttons done up in order before falling into the coma state which normal people call bed time.

I’m amazed and envious at this fad for being a ‘yummy mummy’.  These women must eat nothing but bird food and get up at five every morning to panel beat their way to beauty.  I reckon if I were to attempt this level of maintenance I could kiss goodbye to two hours a day minimum.  So, with this report saying that women only get two hours a week to themselves on average, what do they do?  Presumably they incorporate the time when they’re not eating meals in which to achieve this look.  Even so, their children must be hanging around all the time.  Perhaps they are training up their children as mini masseuse’s.  “Oh yes!  Callum’s been training with the local tech to do hair and beauty.  He’s doing very well.  Next term he’s doing nails and teeth.  It’s such a shame they wouldn’t take him until he’s five, but what can you do?  Rules are rules.”

I can just imagine what that would be like in our house!  If you cast your mind back to a previous entry I described the torture off getting my hair done by the kids.  I have also, on a foolishly weak willed occasion let them do my make up.  This is worse than hair in a lot of ways, because it isn’t until you let an uncoordinated four year old near your face with a make up bag that you realise how many pointy things there are in it, and how near they are to your eyes and nasal cavities.  Mascara, when applied roughly to the whites of the eyes, really, really stings.  Having lip gloss liberally applied to your teeth with swift jabbing motions is not much fun either let me tell you.

Now, if I didn’t spend my life messing around writing blogs, doing Open University Courses, reading books and eating cake, I would probably have enough time to be a yummy mummy, if I’m honest.  I would however be going stark staring mad with boredom and undoubtedly end up having a nervous breakdown and stabbing my children with a manicure set.  If I miss a meal I get seriously tetchy.  That coupled with the worry of burning my face off with the hair straighteners and getting a rash from the bleach for my moustache, would be more than enough to push me over the edge.  Let’s face it, I am not cut out for a life of glamour.  It’s exhausting even thinking about it.  I am cut out for a life of short sightedness, eating sweets and looking like Compo from Last of the Summer Wine, and it’s about time I learned to live with it.

Andrea does do swimming and pilates, which is more than can be said for me.  I do running up and down lots of stairs (I have a three storey house, which seemed like a very nice idea at the start, and is now seeming like a very quick way to go on the hip replacement list) and shouting.  I do a lot of hoovering, which I read somewhere burns the most calories of any form of housework, and I am still agile enough to get under the kitchen table to rescue welded fish finger from the grouting in the tiles.  Sadly, even with these displays of athleticism I don’t think this burns enough calories to count.  Especially not when chocolate cheesecakes are on offer at the Co-op and I have all the will power of a tin of baked beans.

The only way I get jobs I don’t like done is by breaking them up into manageable lumps and giving myself massive rewards in between.  The rewards are always disproportionately extravagant to the thing I don’t want to do; i.e. ‘Now just give the lounge a little light dusting and you can have that trip to Hawaii we talked about.’  Most of my rewards tend to be food based, and so I am able to eat a family sized pack of Mars Bars in the space of three hours, and still feel virtuous because the bathroom is gleaming.

I did do a lot of exercise at one point in my life.  When I was in sixth form me and a few friends used to swim a mile three times a week, go circuit training at the local gym twice a week and do aerobics.  Admittedly we used to go home via the chip shop and drink the town dry on a weekly basis, but we were young and fit.  I was very proud of my progress until my grandmother told me I was starting to look like Fatima Whitbread.  That was the end of everything except the drinking and the chips.  I only went so that I could get toned, not so that I could look like a hirsute bricklayer called Dave (which is what Fatima looks like, especially when she’s wearing a dress).  I never told my gran how traumatising that was, but she can go on the list of people who have failed to make me a goddess with a divine temple for a body, along with my Mum and Mrs. Rance.  Sorry gran.  You have been named and shamed.  Fat lot you care, lounging around on a cloud with granddad smoking roll ups and making your way through an eternity sized vat of hot, sweet tea.

One of gran’s other particularly damning remarks, when you were just about to go out, after having sweated for three hours to turn what was a heaving blob of adolescent angst into the semblance of a sophisticated woman about town who ate foie gras and drank champagne out of her shoes was: “There’s only three letters separating smart from tart, so think on young lady!”  It was strangely mystifying but extremely disheartening and was guaranteed to get you head down in the lager and black as soon as the pub doors opened (I never did drink cider and black, it made me go ‘funny’.)  After vomiting copiously on someone’s best coat in the beer garden for two hours you were neither smart nor tarty and could go home safe in the knowledge that your virtue was intact and your self respect in tatters.  A very effective contraceptive device that one.  I may well employ it with my children.

I think, going back to the world of sport for a moment, that it’s time that the events were more realistic.  I could do the: “Cutting a swathe through Saturday shoppers on the high street” race brilliantly.  I think I could also do: “Pensioner wrestling at a jumble sale” and “Cooking dinner without the aid of a safety net whilst a toddler is pulling your trousers down trying to shin up your leg.” I’m very nippy when Oscar is about to stuff mashed banana into electrical equipment, but only over short distances.  Sprinting is the thing.

There are loads more useful sports that could be invented that would be so entertaining.  Let’s face it, javelin and shot put were brilliant exercises in the olden days where you needed to load your canon without dislocating your arms, or stab a lion in the face with a spear, but what use are they these days?  They need to just move with the times man.  And let’s face it, the days of the winter olympics are numbered if we keep melting the polar ice caps.  I predict that surfing is going to be something that remains popular for some years mind you.