Only three days since the tour ended and I've settled back in to normal life very quickly. Suddenly I am more than capable of eating healthily and going to the gym, which should have been possible when I was on the road (or home for the few days in between) but just wasn't. It's ridiculous how little exercise I was getting and how readily I forgot how good it made me feel and also how energised and relatively slim. But I have remembered now and seem to be becoming myself again, rather than the lazy, glutinous monster who was on my tour. I am definitely only a matter of months away from serious mental illness, but luckily, at the moment, most of the time I have things in check.
I have also discovered that there is a much bigger Virgin Active gym between Shepherd's Bush and Acton, which whilst about the same distance from my house as the one in Hammersmith is better and more convenient and isn't near any shops. When I go to the one in Hammersmith the whole thing can turn into a lost afternoon, but with the newly discovered gym I can cycle up there and back and be home working again within an hour or so. At least that's the theory.
The downside of the newly discovered gym are
a) they do not provide you with free towels, but charge a pound (you can bring your own towel though)
b) they have neither moisturiser or conditioner in the changing rooms (what if I wish to moisturise my buttocks?)
c) it is a family friendly gym, with a kids pool and activity centre which means there are loads of kids in there in the late afternoon, with their posho parents, displaying no shame whatsoever for having created these tiny abominations who are destroying our planet with their consumption and flatulence.
On the other hand it has a much better swimming pool and a bigger gym with mainly fancier equipment and you can play tennis there too. Going to a new place makes it feel like a new start too, so is possibly encouraging me to get back into exercise. I am also aware (as you may have spotted) of the passage of time and the fact that I only have a few more years of relative fitness left, so I'm keen to get back to where I was before I cracked my rib in Edinburgh.
Andrew Collings came over this afternoon to record
Podcast 61 and we morosely mourned our fallen hero status as we rested at 26 in the iTunes charts at the time. What a difference a week makes. We had enjoyed our moment in the sun, but now back to the harsh reality of our mediocrity.
Swine flu was the main point of discussion, which Collings thinks he is safe from because he is taking some superstrength vitamin C tablets that give him something like 1000% of his daily recommended dose. I would say that that is too much Vitamin C and that in all likelihood his body will just excrete the 900% it doesn't need. But it makes him feel safe and ignorance is strength, which makes him one of the strongest men on the planet earth.
I warmed to yesterday's theme of children being an ecological nightmare and a source of shame, arguing that they are, in fact, just sexual excrement - a by-product of intercourse expelled by the body and that if I were to fashion a baby from all the things I excrete from my body and to wrap it in swaddling bands and show it to people that they might not coo over it in the same way as we're expected to with a child.
It was one of the better bits in a more low key podcast, but as I always say this is the nature of these things. In a way I liked it for being more relaxed and less manic and more chatty. But at the end of the day it's all just tomorrow's silicon chip wrappers.
Like a baby we excrete it out into the world and at least have the decency to then leave it on a hillside to die so it doesn't trouble anyone else too much.
Andrew Collings also has been spending a lot of time in the British Library toilets writing down the cottaging based graffiti, which to me suggests a man who is fascinated with it and desperate to get involved but doesn't want to admit it to himself. He did seem genuinely disappointed about our slipping down the charts. I am sure he was looking forward to us getting to number one and the terrible consequences thereof.
He wrote down the cock based graffiti on his copy of the Evening Standard, which had a picture of the Scottish couple infected with swine flu on the cover. It was a picture from their wedding. And Collings had chosen to write his phallic-centric missives on the white of the bride's wedding dress. Which meant she had "Cock?" and "Lunchtime Cock Fun. 9"" written all over her. Thankfully he didn't leave this piece of serial killer style weirdness on the train. What might a stranger have made of this daubing of obscenities on the matrimonial costume of a woman who was currently seriously ill in hospital? What kind of a pervert would carry out this disrespectful abomination?
Only Andrew Collings.
I hope he doesn't become a serial killer as I fear. It would really wreck our podcasts.
