Hey Fatty Bum Bum

With an election approaching, I’ve been chewing things over a bit this week like a cow with more stomachs than it knows what to do with. I’m bored with politics so I turned my thoughts to what I would do as Prime Minister and how I would stamp out obesity. I think I’ve found an answer which is simplicity itself - just as well with my limited brain.

I’m probably a little obsessed just now with exercise as I mentioned last week that I’ve been going daily to the local gym for a blast of cycling, running, sit ups and gossip, and it that has been exhausting. Well, the exercise has been tiring, but coming up with new gossip every day for all the gym buddies and Wimbledon wives is absolutely knackering, let me tell you.

My weight, however, has not been falling off fast enough through diet or exercise so, like a latter day Tony Blair, I have been on the lookout for a third way, and now I think I have it. I will share it with you, but I don’t want my idea stolen and put in some Paul McKenna self help book – he has more money than a Banker celebrating a Lottery win – so I am sharing this for free.

We stayed overnight at a hotel in the countryside on Friday and they gave us a breakfast which was probably left over from the last Apollo moon landing with milk, spoon and cornflakes all contained in a small, shakeable, tub. Very healthy but at times like this I wish I had a gerbil to feed. So we went next door where they had a restaurant run by a gourmet cook who was possibly on the short side, and this Little Chef served porridge that made me feel as if Pavarotti was hiding in my lower intestines. With food very much on my mind then I set off and I noticed Mother Nature giving me the answer to the world’s weight problem.

As I drove I noticed fields filled with sheep, and I idly wondered if I could find one who was not eating. For mile after mile, sheep after sheep, not one of them stopped munching. You never see a sheep just looking around or shooting the breeze with his mates and yet you never see a fat sheep either. So I asked myself Why?

Anyone else would have come to the conclusion that it is because they only eat grass, but not me. I knew the real reason. You never notice fat sheep because we always assume their bulk is down to their wool needing to be sheared off. In other words sheep are masters of disguise by hiding their obesity cleverly under a blanket of wool. Again, someone else would say this means we should all wear baggy clothes, but what happens in the changing rooms at the gym? People would see your playdoh tum and bum then wouldn’t they?

The simple answer for us is to do what sheep do. You never see sheep shaving or using a razor under their arms or on their legs. Sheep just let the wool grow, and that is what we should do. No more epilating, no more razors or special creams. Let’s all grow long beards to hide our double chins. Let’s all encourage hairy legs and other bits to hide our excess flab.

Of course chewing gum would be a thing of the past - I’m told lambs don’t appreciate the smell of mint - but, let’s face it, it’s a small price to pay.

If we all live like sheep, our confidence will be higher. Mortgages will be history as we all commune together, fitness trainers will have to retrain as hairdressers, January’s Fitness DVDs will be obsolete, and every TV programme will be presented by The Hairy Bikers.

And politics and elections will be a thing of the past.

Holiday

I’ve just had a week off from work and I would love to tell you that my plan of having seven days of debauchery, lying in bed till the afternoon, getting up to have a breakfast of chocolate Easter eggs and then lying around catching up on unwatched Desperate Housewives episodes, came true. But it didn’t.

Life, sadly, doesn’t turn out the lazy way we plan, unless you’re a WAG or a politician. When the first WAG becomes an MP then the game really will be up.

I had written down loads of things to catch up and do this week, and by the weekend I had accomplished most of the important stuff on the list. I had written my quarterly fan letter to the VAT man, a distant bloke who seems never to give any love back despite the money I send him, I renewed my house insurance so my collection of single socks and dead plants are once again protected, I caught up on a few new albums, and I even dropped in on my daughter’s dance class to watch her end of term display. Being the only person not wearing a bra in the room I felt completely out of place and I waited expectantly for my Billy Elliot moment when I would suddenly jump up and join in. To my daughter’s relief, it didn’t arrive.

Last time I watched her perform it was like looking at a class of seals tapping their flippers in time to a beat that was in their heads but not on the CD. This time was magical. Suddenly they had evolved into mini grownups who actually looked like they could stay on their feet and knew that “coordination” wasn’t the street with the Rovers Return pub. I was very proud.

After the dancing I even managed to get out in my garden, although the word “garden” at the moment seems an exaggeration as it has as much colour as an X ray – unless you count the lovely green moss growing in the brown grass and spreading its joy on the patio.

Our plot is around half an acre which is large compared to a window box but small when next to, say, Beth Ditto’s drawers. It’s big enough to warrant me being out there every weekend from now till winter and I did really enjoy the first weeding, clearing and backache.

If you’re thinking “how sad that in his life that passes for fun” then you don’t understand my neighbourhood. Over the garden walls you can catch up on the gossip from the past few months while everyone has been shut indoors, and a quick try out on the kids’ trampoline means I can see what others are having for their tea or what they’re watching on telly. One neighbour even told me he’d seen things from his trampoline that would make my hair curl, and then he shut up before expanding further. I think he suddenly realised he’d seen them going on in my house.

Talking of expanding further, my proudest achievement this week is that I have finally got around to doing something about my waistline, by going back to the gym. I managed five trips this week to do cycling, running, sit ups, weights and the recovery hot chocolate, and I am now officially obsessed with exercise again.

In my mind the pounds are coming off, I no longer look pregnant, I’ll soon be able to squeeze back in to my XXXL pants again, and elasticated waistbands and smocks will be a thing of the past. I’ll even be able to throw away my new T shirt which Debbie uses as a Slanket.

Having a week off is fun. Why don’t we do it every week?

Mother Of Mine

Well we can put the rhubarb wine away now as that’s another Mother’s Day over. It’s a day that should be filled with joy and happiness. The most important bit of that sentence, of course is, SHOULD BE, because for me it’s a day when just about everything that can go wrong usually does.

As I leave it too late to book a nice restaurant, and the days of getting away with McDonalds and a free toy seem to have paled for my wife, the whole Mother’s Day thing is a minefield.

First up my own mum told me, as she does every year, that she didn’t want me to waste money on a present, which is very kind but leaves me every year asking “but does she mean it?”. She says that flowers just die and chocolates make her fat, but if I sent her paper roses and a box of Diet Chef meals she just might be offended, no?

This year she excelled herself with a new one. After the usual pleas for no presents to be sent she said, “And I don’t need a card either - I’ve still got the one you sent last year”. So I was then faced with a double whammy of potential minefields. So what to do?

I turned to friends who told me the solution was to send her a poem that I should write myself. I tried constructing a work of art but it all looked like a Christmas cracker insert and I couldn’t get anything to rhyme in a way that my mum would have liked. Poems are easy when they’re about girlfriends as you can always get something romantic to go with their name, but unfortunately I couldn’t get away from rhyming Mum with Bum.

In the end I decided to send something that would remind her of how important and indispensible she has been in my life. I sent her my washing.

Here in my own home we are past the stage of our kids making necklaces from sweeties and painting the word Mum on stones from the garden and calling them paperweights. The kids are a bit more mature now, even if their Dad isn’t, so they bought Mum a teapot and made a card.

I booked a restaurant which was great for atmosphere and food tho’ I could have done without the kid with the hula hoop knocking dishes over and generally confusing the dining table with a Tumble Tots picnic.

I also got the flowers. The last bunch of roses I bought was for our wedding anniversary and they died quicker than the smile on a flying ant in a room full of spiders. So I had to source these ones with all the care and research of Doctor Who looking for a heart surgeon. I’ve noticed, by the way, that the good doctor, the man with two hearts who should be able to give twice the love, gets rid of his companions before they get too close. Saves on poems and dodgy roses.

He’s not daft as it also means he’ll never have a mother in law to worry about, wondering if Mother’s Day falls on the same date on Earth as on Gallifrey or Mars. In fairness mine never says “don’t send me anything” but we still have to make sure she gets a call.

Marriage should come with a warning. Get hitched, have babies by all means. But they don’t tell you when you get married that you’ll end up with three Mothers’ Days to worry about do they?

I Go Ape

I sang a duet with multiple Grammy award winner Neil Sedaka this week.

As he has a new musical about his life story being premiered I was lucky enough to meet and interview him again and, as we chatted afterwards, I mentioned a favourite song of mine that he’d written years ago. Unfortunately it’s not a song he sings often and he’d forgotten the words, so I sang them for him and his eyes lit up as he joined in. Of course I should have told him to butt out, one singer one song and all that, but I figured “well if he’s enjoying it let him have his moment”. Having duetted with Elton John, Carole King and others, he probably saw this as something his career had been building towards.

Over the years many have fought to sing with me – at least I think they have as fighting usually breaks out when I sing - and I’ve lost count of the number of times folk have shouted at me the title of that classic Joe Dolce song “Shaddup Ya Face”, presumably expecting me to burst in to song with them. Simon Cowell even told me I could win the X Factor and he rated my voice. Actually, what he said was “your voice is X rated”, but I knew what he meant.

Whoever is behind the publicity for Cowell’s various money making projects is doing their job too well just now as I’m suffering from Cowell fatigue every time I look in the papers or on television. Even his partners in crime are so horribly over exposed that I find myself wishing Piers Morgan would join all the other great British piers and catch fire before falling in to the sea.

Then there’s Cheryl and Ashley, toughening it out in their Cole bunker and only coming out when there’s an emergency like an album to plug or a party to attend. As journalists try to unearth ever more dirt on them they make it impossible for me to go anywhere without wanting to scream for sanity, and I cannot bear Brat King Cole and his missus any more.

That’s why I was delighted this week to come across a web site called Happy News Dot Com. It sets out to show only the good news from around the world, and this week it featured the warming tale of Grace Groner, an American lady who died aged 100. She had lived all her life in a tiny house and bought all her clothes from car boot sales yet, in her will this week, she left her former college a surprise seven million dollars.

Then there was the story of two eight year old boys in Australia who saved a man from drowning, a diver who wrestled a Frisbee ring from around a suffocating shark’s throat, and the tale of a dog collar and lead, billed as “once belonging to Charles Dickens”, being auctioned off for twelve thousand dollars. I’m hoping that it actually belonged to Charles Dickens’s dog rather than to the writer himself.

But no matter how hard I looked amongst the good news stories, I couldn’t see any sign of my duet with Neil Sedaka. I should email them with the background and suggest an uplifting headline like “Old Man Made Very Happy”.

Or perhaps I’m being selfish. Maybe the headline should be about Sedaka instead of me.