6751/19671
Laid a little low by my cold/covid vaccine/chemo residual/the exhaustion that comes from doing two RHLSTPs and travelling to London and back. I had hoped to get an episode of Relativity written by the end of May, but have managed only one scene (which I wrote a month ago). As always, I suspect, I will get there and as always not do the work far in advance.
I was forced to take it easy and however much my body gets into producing weird collections of cells that it plans to kill or replace me with, I shall listen to my body.
My keenness to get fit has resulted in me buying a rowing machine. It's a little throwback to 2004 when I was trained by Olympians to row part of the Oxford/Cambridge boat race route. Sometimes my life sounds like a lie made up by a fantasist trying to impress you in a pub, but who you are not taken in by for a second. Yes, I won the Oxford Cambridge boat race and Jonathan Aitken was the cox.
Back then we were all loaned a rowing machine to train on and had the option of buying it at a reduced rate. But I let them take it back. And let my fitness slip back into fatness in the familiar pattern that has dogged my life. But I've been using a rowing machine in my personal training sessions and I quite like it and am hopeful I can now do a couple of sessions a week. We'll see, of course.
The delivery man was meant to put it in the room we needed it, but he scarpered fast and so for the moment the machine is in its box in the middle of the lounge and the kids are using it to play and draw on. It's probably a bit too heavy for us to get into the room we are going to put it in. So it might just stay where it is as a sort of table/art project. Or maybe the only exercise it will provide is getting it lifted into the place that it's going to stay unused for the rest of its natural life.
Either way, I was not in a position to use it or even lift it today. But just having the machine is a positive step, right?
And I couch all this in scepticism, of course, because of experience, but there is something different behind the health kick this time and I hope the focus of partially accepting my own mortality will mean I actually achieve something permanent (or at least as semi-permanent as my own lifespan) this time.
It's going OK anyway. Weight is tending downwards, though I am not getting freaked out or put off when it suddenly jumps up for no reason and I don't feel like I am missing out on anything, even as I approach my 150th day without alcohol. Apart from feeling terrible, I am feeling well.
And weirdly it's only a day later that I really felt the proper excitement and triumph of having done a live gig again. As lovely as it's been to do the podcast remotely, the live audience is such a huge part of why this podcast series works (and what sets it apart from most of the competitors). You were an amazing crowd last night and I hope more people will be tempted out by the next few line-ups. Just added to the 7th June show is David Baddiel. The social distancing is done brilliantly by the excellent Clapham Grand team and you are in very safe hands.
Buy your tickets here. 
