The awfulness of exercise, past and present, with 15 tracks of noisy music to go

The audio column. Music with words. A diary with optional noise. This week, it’s mostly to do with gym. As in gymnasiums. With a sonic bias towards garage rock. 15 tracks, some louder than others. Have a read. Or take a listen. The Mixcloud link and playlist is at the end.

 Gyms are evil places, full of desperation, fear of death and terrible music. They smell of bodily fluids and the aerosols or unguents used to combat those emissions. And worst of all they bring back memories of gym, singular, the concept. Physical education. PE.

What is a personal trainer, after all, but the lycra-clad manifestation of the PE teacher who used to bellow or screech demands at uncoordinated, scrawny creatures like myself? Circuit training: Break your neck somersaulting over that wooden horse, which didn’t resemble anything remotely equine, to be deliberately dropped by the bullies on the other side who were meant to catch you. Climb the dizzying heights of that thick, smelly rope, touch the ceiling, do not fall. Small robust boys would swarm up and down like rats on a ship’s mooring cable.

Gawky, lanky unmuscled streaks of existential misery like myself (shorts, bare top, no t-shirts allowed) would strain just to get their feet off the ground. Wallbars, dangerous wooden climbing ladders, surrounded the room, which always reeked of decayed Dunlop Green Flash gutties or the Woolworth equivalents. Well-developed classmates would scamper up and around, swinging their death-defying way to teacherly approval. Muttering their Tarzan whoops. I hated them.

Boys, of course. What girls did in their separate gym across the corridor was a mystery. Probably something involving ribbons, dolls, hockey sticks  and skipping ropes. The genders only came together in the weeks before Christmas for compulsory Scottish country dancing, something which has surely erased all terpsichorean instincts from generations of pupils. Boys on one side of the gym, girls on the other. Choose your partners on the whistle. Delay too much and you could find yourself coupled with the distaff gym teacher in a Gay Gordons clinch. I can smell the fag reek yet.

All this has been brought back due to a post-festivities lurch towards health guilt: Navigating the two-heartattack pathway to continued survival must involve more than my daily 8-tablet drug regime and the compulsory consumption of red wine. 

The textile stocks covering the running machine have been removed. An app called ‘Couch to 5K’ installed on my phone and activated. It’s mild interval training for the nearly dead – 90 seconds walking, 60 slightly faster pseudo jogging. For 20 minutes. Three times a week.

I have an Umbro track suit – no shorts – and trainers. I have completed two sessions on the electric treadmill with Sarah Millican’s Durham tones in my earbuds. “Well done! Keep going!”

The charms of this comic voiceover artiste are wearing off. She is becoming a PE teacher. Stop shouting! The running redoubt reeks of staffroom Capstan Full Strength, unwashed children, wet wool and sweat soaked floorboards. The smell of gym.

I’m going out for a walk. I may be some time.

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Meanwhile being a councillor is weighing very heavily at the moment. The tedium is all pervasive. Setting a budget in a time of cost cutting and Governmental penny pinching. While both my fellow councillors and officers stubbornly refuse to face up to reality. I know. Let’s get charities to do stuff. Volunteers. For nothing. That’ll work. Or…let’s make money selling ice cream at licensing board meetings. Though…wait a minute…

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I have a new phone. It is a Google Pixel 7 Pro. It is worse than my old phone  and cost three times as much. 

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Paid £11.29 to watch The Banshees of Innisherin on Amazon Prime. It would be easy to say things like…I can’t put my finger on what’s wrong with it…Martin McDonagh has lost his touch…but no. Let’s just say it’s a really clumsy, uh,heavy handed allegory that make you yearn for early episodes of Father Ted, which it shamelessly rips off. Drink! Feck! Girls!

CLICK HERE FOR THE MIXCLOUD AUDIO VERSION WITH THE FOLLOWING TRACKS…

The Litter — Action Woman

Aztec Camera — Walk Out to Winter

Prefab Sprout — Appetite

Lloyd Cole — Charlotte Street

The Misunderstood — Children of the Sun

ABC — All of My Heart

Talk Talk — I Don’t Believe in You

The Blue Nile — Stay

John Martyn — Sweet Little Mystery

The The — The Beaten Generation

Fuzztones — Bad News Travels Fast

Waterboys — This is the Sea

Standells — Hey Joe, Where You Gonna Go

Robert Wyatt — Shipbuilding

The Cynics — Baby, What’s Wrong With Me?