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The main thing about stopping smoking that worried me, worries most people, is that I’d suddenly turn into Jabba the Hut, a blob. Initially, going smoke free comes with a big burst of energy and my carefully hatched plan was to swap the addiction for nicotine for the equally addictive vanity of exercise — and it seems to have worked.
The last time I gave up smoking I was running cross-country, over the fields until I could run no more. Sort of romantic, sort of effective, but this time I’ve gone for a more scientific, direct approach. It’s taken me two years to get round to it and I reckoned if it was going to buy me another ten it was worth investing a bit of cash and time on the project. The more I thought about it, the more I figured that it was the most important thing I had to do this year. So I bought some reconditioned fitness equipment and booked myself a trainer three times a week. I’m also trying to do another three times a week in the gym with my wife, mainly arguing with her about whose turn it is to use the big running machine now. She had a baby at the beginning of autumn and is as keen as me to get trim. Side by side in the whitewashed gym, the two running machines, his and hers, look like a piece of contemporary art in a gallery, a strange futuristic echo of a romantic promenade, or an eerie postmodern take on a rose garden, perhaps. I’ve actually broken the smaller running machine, by being too fat for it.
I find it surprising that the people who live, work and visit here are far more intrigued by the gym and its hoard of curious machines than anything else I’ve ever bought or built for the property. Come to think of it, no one ever asks if they can sit in the rose garden or stand on top of the mound. Even the new flat-screen telly hasn’t caused more than a ripple and the cows don’t seem to intrigue anyone as much as they do me, but I’ve had to start telling people they can’t use the gym. Every time I went in there, there was an au pair or a friend of a friend puffing and panting away.
It’s a great gym — for two years’ worth of fag money we got a rowing machine, we got skipping ropes, medicine balls and hula hoops. There are weights. There are big soft mats. There’s a frame for doing weights, a strange plate that wobbles and somehow enables me to touch my toes. There’s an elliptical trainer coming and I don’t even know what that is. But now I’m never happier than when I’m strapped up to a heart monitor and calorie counter and going at it hell for leather.
I’ve had a few personal trainers over the years, but this new guy is excellent. They usually say something like ‘don’t worry about how much you weigh, muscle weighs more than fat and you’re going to be putting on muscle so you might actually not lose any weight’, but this new guy is forever weighing me and telling me I’ve got to lose a few more pounds. He has banned me from eating cheese for the time being. I thought that would be a serious blow. I spend a lot of time thinking about cheese, but it’s actually brilliant to be briefly released from patterns of behaviour, a kind of freedom.
I’ve never felt so good. Even eating healthily doesn’t seem onerous as long I can have the odd blow out. Still, it was after a 12-course banquet in a three-Michelin-star restaurant that a cigar seemed like a really good idea a few years back…
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