Is It Just Me? (16 page)

You leave your house, waving confidently at your neighbour in their garden: ‘Look at the new me, oh yes.’ This is it. You’re going out on a jog. You’re a jogger now. You’re five bars into ‘Eye of the Tiger’ (approximately eight seconds) and things are going brilliantly. You’re a leopard, an amazing, prancing leopard, running wild and free as you were born to do. Yeah! You must have been going for at least five minutes. You look at your watch. Thirty seconds? Oh, well . . . keep going. Then ooh, ouch, legs burning, is that a stitch? Must . . . get . . . air . . . in . . . You stop, pretending to tie your shoelaces because your neighbour is still looking on. You clasp your thighs, which appear to be wobbling even though you’ve now been standing still for at least ten seconds. (Please tell me it’s not just me who turned thirty and found their flesh started moving independently to their main frame? A deeply distressing and frankly unacceptable milestone in a person’s life. And not the best image – apologies, and back to the jogging). Your neighbour eventually goes in, but you don’t want to be caught skulking straight back home after your thirty-second jog, so you go to the pub for a drink, then run sprightly past her window forty minutes later, waving smugly to feign a socially acceptable level of fitness.

Having dispensed with the idea of jogging, how else can we get ourselves moving? A personal trainer? No thanks. I once made the mistake of paying for a personal training session.

At 7.30 on the morning in question, a lithe, toned young Australian man rang my doorbell. He was confronted by a smelly and bed-headed English woman.

‘Miranda? G’day, I’m Bud. Ready for a hardcore workout? Let’s burn some fat, you’re going to feel great!’

Horrified by this prospect, I had no choice but to reply, ‘No, I won’t, I’ll feel hot, embarrassed, angry, ashamed, sweaty and ill. Go away, eat some lard, pretend I never rang and let me go back to bed; it’s too early for this rubbish.’ And with that I slammed the door in his face victorious, even though it cost me 60 quid.

Of course, you could resort to the fitness DVD. But is it just me, or do you always find yourself trying three of the moves, declaring the workout ‘a bit too dancey’ and then flopping down bitterly on the sofa to watch it with a bag of popcorn while bitching about the participants’ outfits? And I do think that the people who make the exercise videos are rather
too
fit, if we’re honest. It’s simply showing off. I’d far rather have a fitness video starring a plump woman in her pyjamas who’s sort of doing her best and who tells you that if you do ten grapevines (a term you become all too familiar with as you embrace the world of organised fitness), you can have a pie.

When the laws of Miranda-Land come into effect, I plan to introduce a fitness-DVD grading system. While you’re shedding the first few stone, you work with Mrs Porky and her sausage roll bribes. After that, you can graduate to a more muscular, size 12 trainer. And only when you’re on the home stretch are you exposed to Little Miss Size 10 Wonder-Beauty, with her six pack, spinning squat thrusts and thong-prep butt clench dancercise. As things stand, fitness DVDs are not for me.

‘What about visiting a local swimming bath?’ I hear you say. A simple no because of the
admin
involved in swimming. That terrible, terrible swimming administration or, if you will: ‘swim-min’. The getting there; the complicated locker; the getting changed (bent double, towel in mouth, balancing on one leg, making sure that no one sees an inch of your bare body); the negotiating around an army of naked ladies in unsuitable positions (MDRC, it will
never
be acceptable to be nude in public, let alone BENT OVER IN THE NUDE in public); and the showering
before
you get in – that I find insulting. I am perfectly clean, thank you.

Then, when you’re finally in the pool, you have to choose between the fast lane, the medium lane and the slow lane. This is another of life’s unworkable systems. The medium lane is always stuffed to the gills (everyone playing it safe), so you decide to be adventurous and have a crack at the fast lane. This is comparable to the wall of death: aspiring Olympians barrel past you doing the butterfly as you splutter wildly and try to ignore their sporty shouts of scorn. You give up, and slink back into the slow lane, where you spend twenty minutes doggy-paddling behind two octogenarians on a day-trip, knowing that if you speed up even a fraction you’re going to find an eighty-five-year-old foot in your face.

In fact, the option of swimming is an academic one for me, as I’m currently not allowed back into my local pool. There was a bit of an incident when I became so enraged by the tyranny of the lanes that I chose to swim widths. It was jolly good fun, actually, going under and over those lane-divider thingies like a crazy, rebel dolphin. The trouble came when I went a tad too fast over one of them, and it deftly removed my tankini bottoms. I failed to notice this until I was up and out of the pool. I looked down, gave a shriek, and hurled myself back into the water, landing smack-bang on a rather buff gent in the fast lane. (I like to call it my ‘muff on buff’ moment, if you pardon the vernacular.)

Once you’ve tried the obvious exercise solutions – and found them wanting – you might be a bit more adventurous. Embrace whichever fads are doing the rounds: Zumba dancing, Pilates cardio, boxer jazz, hula hooping, ballroom pump, tap dancing on a Swiss ball. At some point during this odyssey, an oddly toned, middle-aged woman with an inappropriate henna tattoo and a hemp basket of herbal remedies for every mild complaint, who invariably lives in Notting Hill, will approach you and say, ‘Oh, you must try yoga. Yoga’s worked wonders for me. I’m sixty-four years old and I’ve got the bottom of a teenager. Here, have a feel!’

Yoga I can’t endure for one simple reason: they say it’s jolly good at ‘freeing you up’, but I defy anyone over the age of thirty-five to get into the downward-dog position and not find themselves ‘freed up’ in one particular area: the bottom department. In that pose, you can let out one hell of a trumpety one, I’ll tell you that for nothing. And what makes it all the more awful is that when someone farts at yoga,
you can’t even laugh.
This surely contravenes the most basic of human rights. When you or someone near you lets out a loud and lengthy fart in an otherwise silent room, surely the only appropriate response is to hoot with uncontrollable laughter for at least twenty minutes? Yoga teachers are, to me, little more than fart-laugh-police.

Which leaves us with The Gym. If you know me at all, you’ll know I don’t believe in these pricey cathedrals of manky sporting equipment covered in other people’s sweat. I’ve done my time with gyms. I have all too often tipped up on January 4th (believing that by September I will be a fitness instructor myself), signed up for the twenty-four-month membership (so called because it sounds less than two years), gone every day for three weeks, had two days off and never returned. I’ve then spent the next twenty-three months seeing sixty British pounds going out of my bank account and making me feel like an idiot of the highest order. I
know
this isn’t just me. We are fools, all of us: we’re paying to keep those gyms running. We’re spending £720 a year to get the fit people fitter. Without our money, the gyms would crumble and all the fit people would run to fat. It would be a wonderful revenge and life would be a more level playing field. But it’s too late: we’ve signed the contract and we can’t stop paying, so we all sit around getting spongier and spongier while the lithe people continue to get lither. All because we thought we knew ourselves a little better than we actually did, back on January 4th. Gym membership is, basically, an Optimism Tax.

But, don’t be disheartened, for I will now furnish you with a solution. We’ll return to
The Wonderful Laws of Miranda-Land
, and create an
Exercise Policy
. Pay attention, for your leader speaketh:

In the first weeks of January, a special squad of Fitness Police will stand outside gyms, and briskly interrogate anyone a bit lardy and hopeful who looks as if they’re about to sign a contract. Questions asked will include:

‘Now, sir, are you sure you’re not just doing this because you saw a picture of Daniel Craig in
Heat
and quite fancy looking like him? Because, sir, I can tell you now, you WILL NEVER LOOK LIKE HIM.’

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather just go for a walk in the park, madam? It’s free, and it’s ever such a lovely day. It really is awful in that gym, you know. It smells like a giant crotch.’

As a consequence of this rigorous policing, within two years gyms will no longer exist. They’ll all be turned into ‘Adult Bouncy Castle Centres’, where full-grown people will be able to bounce energetically to a soundtrack of their choosing.

Furthermore, exercise in general will only be permitted if it’s also in some way fun. Examples:

In fact, MDRC, we don’t need to wait for Miranda-Land to exist to commence proceedings. I dare you to go – now – and make some maracas. Put some pebbles in a coconut, whack it on a stick, bung on some salsa, and off you go. Perhaps you could dance along to
Strictly Come Dancing
with your maracas? You could call it ‘S & M’ – Strictly and Maracas. Yes, I foresee absolutely no confusion there.

Remember, fitness MUST be fun. What’s that I hear you say? Time for another brand-new amusing compound word? Quite right, how about ‘Fun-ness’? Forget exercise, fun-ness is the only way. Let the streets be filled with galloping commuters, moonwalking postmen and hopscotching office workers.

I
don’t know about you, but all that talk of exercise has made me very hungry indeed. But I will refrain from suggesting a sandwich break because diets have been very much on my mind, what with being on a mission to slim down for forty.

On the subject of diets, I would just like to get something off my currently large upper-circumference of a chest. That thing is this: can we please stop this nonsense that is the
multi-billion pound
diet industry? I have written the only diet book that I believe needs to exist, and here it is:

It is scientifically proven. It means we don’t have to read books with four-stage diet cycles, buy ridiculous ingredients we wouldn’t normally ask a hamster to eat – may I draw your attention to tofu – and have to explain to our loved ones that we are going to have bad breath and terrible wind because we must eat cabbage soup for breakfast.

My book is the only one you need, and here endeth my contribution to the diet industry. Yours sincerely, Miranda Hart.

Now, let’s all reward ourselves with a cup of tea and one biscuit. Not two, just one. Thereby adhering to the instructions in chapter one of my diet book. I thank you.

I hereby declare it officially time for another literary pit stop. And may I say on our behalf that I believe we have earned it, for in the space of four chapters, we’ve rollicked through enough body-beauty-exercise-diet business to keep a women’s magazine going for a year. Consider all questions of beauty, weight, exercise and diet now officially dealt with.

It’s time now to have a look back at what we’ve achieved since out last pit stop, and play
Miranda’s Amazing Tick-Box Game
! If you’ve done any of things listed below please tick away: