Exercise

I was mid-hip thrust when I found out Shane Gillis had called me a whore. Technically I found out four hours later, when I reviewed the footage of Saturday Night Live. My tripod was on the bench, my ring light was clamped to the squat rack and my boyfriend Tanner was holding the back-up phone for the side angle. Tanner films all my content. He is not allowed to look at me.   Solidarity means centering yourself in other people’s trauma, in front of a camera, with good lighting The “joke” was about how women dress at the gym. I know it was about me, because everything is. So I did what any survivor would do. I went to my car and filmed myself crying.

One of the drawbacks of being on the jabs is that you can lose muscle mass as well as body fat. I’ve been taking Mounjaro for about six months and, apart from the expense, I have few complaints. I’ve lost about 20lb and generally feel healthier. But Caroline insists I combine the weight loss with lifting weights, so I’ve been making regular visits to a gym in White City. I hear horror stories from gym users about people treating the space as if it’s their personal film set I used to be a bit of a gym rat in my twenties and thirties, but marriage and children, not to mention a full workload, put paid to that. Not much has changed in the last quarter century, save for one glaring difference: everyone is constantly on their phones.

They weren’t familiar park visitors, but a couple with a specific purpose, laden down with camera equipment. They unpacked carefully, without the swift expertise of a professional photographer and his model, working on the clock. Years ago, we went to Japan on our honeymoon, and the girl’s outfit was something I’d seen before in Tokyo – a pink and white frilly knee-length crinoline, flailing with ribbons. In Harajuku, it used to be called Lolita-style, and the girls parade up and down competitively. In this country, I don’t suppose anyone has dressed like that since Bubbles Rothermere died. The only sign of embarrassment was that they would not catch anyone’s eye.

I adhere to a pretty iron-clad rule: not only do I avoid the bumper cars of social media, but I don’t read the comments after my columns. Many other journalists avidly lap up reader responses to their work, and there’s certainly something to be said for confronting detractors, thus learning to anticipate counter-arguments and to guard against misinterpretation. But for me – I doubt this makes me unusual – one scornful put-down has a more lasting effect than ten gushing compliments. Forbidding myself from hitting that bottom tab is a matter of self-protection. While writing, I don’t want to lose my nerve, and too keen an awareness of your (potentially hostile) audience can be inhibiting, as if someone is reading over your shoulder.

Just as you always hope will happen, I knew I had met the man of my dreams almost on sight. I had made a booking the day before. I arrived. Burak was just finishing the previous customer and gestured with a comb towards an armchair. A Turkish coffee was brought. The customer paid and left and I took his place in the chair before the mirror. ‘Now, sir,’ Burak said, with an ingratiating formality not quite his own. ‘What can I...’ But as he was asking about the haircut, the nervous pale English boy at the next station in the barber’s interrupted. ‘Er, Burak,’ he said, tremulously. ‘I wonder, er, would you mind if I borrowed your...’ ‘Nah,’ Burak said, all ingratiation gone in a fierce flash. ‘Nah. Fuck off.’ He turned to me. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said.

It was a few months ago. I was coming back from my morning walk with Greta in Battersea Park, so it can only have been half past ten in the morning. A familiar neighbourhood figure zigzagged recklessly across the road towards us. He had something like a sense of purpose about him. Telling a stranger that his avoirdupois could give G.K. Chesterton a run for his money counts as a hate crime ‘Have you got –’ he paused and reckoned – ‘£5? To get something to eat?’ Five pounds seemed an ambitious amount. I thought I’d answer the implied request and not the question he’d actually asked. ‘I’m not going to give you £5,’ I said briskly. He looked about as ghastly as usual – that yellow-grey, oily quality of the long-term heroin aficionado.

Gstaad Here’s a tip for you young whippersnappers: don’t get old, but if you do, you can fool Father Time by training the smart way. By this I don’t mean you should follow all that bull that floats around online. I don’t use social media, but I’m told that a system exists, which reaches millions across multiple platforms, that spreads misinformation about health, and then some. The wellness industry means big moolah, and is as phoney as Hollywood morality. Take it from Taki: all you need in order to feel good and be able to enjoy yourself is a little exercise before breakfast, and some semi-hard training in the afternoon. C’est tout, mes amis, as they say in gay Paree.

Ommm… are you in the lotus position? Then I’ll begin. The studio was literally Hades, four industrial heaters blasting in each corner. We were crouching on our knees, sweat dripping, foreheads to the floor. It was a weekday morning. Then our instructor said the six words I can never unhear. ‘Flower your anus to the sky,’ he ordered all the middle-aged WFH men in shorts and yummy mummies in crop tops in this crunchy-granola bit of north-west London. He jutted his rock-hard buns heavenwards as an exemplar of the uttana shishosana pose or, as I prefer to call it, ‘kneeling’. When did the lines blur and yoga become a hot cultish mess of sex and spirituality?

I hadn’t noticed how much weight I’d put on during lockdown until I went out for a business lunch a couple of weeks ago. It was the first time I’d put on a suit and tie in 16 months. As I struggled to pull on the trousers, I thought: ‘Something’s wrong here. Did Caroline hang one of the children’s suits in my cupboard by mistake?’ But no. It was mine. To fasten the trousers I had to suck in my stomach like Mr Incredible trying to squeeze into his superhero costume. And my ‘slim fit’ white shirt wasn’t merely snug; it was more like a straitjacket. I looked like a bald Boris in his pre-Covid pomp.

There are few public health interventions as successful as parkrun. It wasn’t set up as a public health intervention, which may be one of the reasons it has worked so beautifully. The first one was just a group of friends doing a 5k time trial in London’s Bushy Park. But in the years since that first event in 2004, parkrun has spread across the world. It went from being a largely middle-class event for people who already considered themselves runners to being a part of many communities, deliberately expanding into deprived areas and trying to get a slower average time for participants completing the course, because that meant it wasn’t just reaching established runners and fit types.

The start of lockdown The earliest known use of ‘lockdown’ in its current sense was in a 1973 story in the Fresno Bee, a Californian newspaper, referring to prisoners being kept in their cells after a knife attack. Despite apparently giving the world the concept, not all Fresno locals seemed happy to be placed in lockdown in April. A protest in May resulted in a fight between protestors and the president of the city council. Bed cover How full of Covid patients are hospitals?