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Hands up who thinks I’ve done any exercise since my last post? 

If your hand is in the air you are a) wrong, and b) a bit simple for putting your hand up.  Saturday night the missus and I found ourselves in a lovely restaurant overlooking Trevaunance Cove in St Agnes, Cornwall.  After a very nice starter — squid and chorizo salad — my main course arrived; moules marinière with a side bowl of chips.  There’s a rule (I don’t know if it’s true or not and frankly I don’t care, but it makes sense) that if a mussel hasn’t opened during cooking, you shouldn’t eat it.  I found an unopened mussel and lifted it up.  I shouldn’t eat that, I thought to myself.  It might give me the shits.  Hang on, that might help me lose weight…

Trevaunance Cove, St Agnes (C) http://www.consolsoils.co.uk/

So I ate it.  I prised open a mussel and ate it, full in the knowledge — hoping, in fact — that it would give me a stomach bug which in turn might help me lose weight.  That’s right, people — after all my bluster last week about doing some ruddy exercise I (unsuccessfully) tried to give myself food poisoning as an alternative to doing any exercise.  That aside I lived up to my greedy tag, polishing off my moules, the accompanying baguette and bowl of chips, despite the fact that finishing the chips was a real struggle.  I sat there, stuffed full, neither needing nor really wanting any more food, but there it was in front of me — food that hadn’t been eaten.  So I had to eat it.  It’s a compulsion I have.  A disease.  I blame my parents for all those times as a child they wouldn’t let me leave the table until I’d eaten my brussel sprouts, bribing me that I’d “grow up big and strong like He-Man.”  Sorry ma and pa but I went too far.

He-Man (this is how I perceive myself in my mind)

I say I did no exercise; we walked a few miles each day along the cliffs.  Saturday we walked from Porthtowan (we stayed in a cracking B&B overlooking the bay) to Portreath, about a six mile roundtrip.  On Sunday we walked to Trevaunance Cove (five and three quarter miles according to the sign outside the pub where we stopped to call a taxi to take us back to the car because the walk had taken us twice as long as we thought it would and we wanted to go home).  So I did *some* exercise.  I got my heart rate up on a couple of occasions (the Saturday walk featured a couple of very steep inclines) and got a bit of a ‘dab on’ (anyone who knows me will tell you that it really doesn’t take much to make me sweat though).  I just think walking doesn’t feel like *real* exercise, you know?

Tonight is Wednesday night, and you know what Wednesday night is?  No, it’s not the night “we’re gonna make love” (Flight of the Conchords reference.  Not sure it works to be honest but click on the link anyway) — it’s the night I waddle around a school gymnasium sweating, gasping for breath and trying to kick lumps out of the worst (and preferably weakest) footballer on the opposing team.  I’ll make no promises regarding my calorie intake afterwards, but please keep your fingers crossed (metaphorically of course, just in case you put your hand up at the start of this blog).