We need to exercise. Said so in the Times. Front page news. Boils down to this: exercise is probably pretty good for you. Who’d’a known that?? But to labour the point, an American study found that just 10 minutes a week of something like a ‘brisk walk’ or dancing, reduces your likelihood of dying within the next decade by almost 20% Holy shit!!! I’m walking round the house as I write this, briskly, the iPad hanging on a lanyard round my neck. Cos if I stop and sit still I will die! Or, I’ll be 80% more likely to die. Within the next 10 years.

Even with the test being performed in America, I wanna know where they found people (among the 88,000 being tested for 9 years, so its sounds pukka) who don’t do 10 minutes of walking a week. The ‘test sample’. The validating group. The 20% who obviously did die or there’d be no story. Did they nail people to their beds? Chain them to the floor of a dungeon? What?? Even some great, fat, supersized Yank has to walk over to the phone to call Uber Eats. Or get up to answer the door when the pizzas arrive. That’s exercise, innit??

The test group were aged from 40 to 85. Yet no mention was made of any age significance or correlation. I’m no gambler but I’d bet 3 Big Macs that someone starting at 40 is way less likely to die in his next decade than someone who is 85. Regardless of how much walking he/she does. But they didn’t mention that.

I walk tons. I like walking and hate crowds. So I walk the long way from my station every morning so I don’t have to change tube lines or encounter a million tourists on walking tours down The Strand. And I always take the stairs. Up or down. Firstly cos I hate lifts. But also because it hurts. In that virtuously masochistic way that enables you to sneer smugly at all the fat bastards who took the escalator. “Hah!” I’m gonna tell them today. “You’ll all be DEAD within a decade!” In fact its only 20% of them who’ll be dead but we don’t know which ones til it happens. And I can’t shout it that loudly as I’m always a bit breathless by the top of the stairway, with serious thigh-burn.

But they need scaring into action. I don’t want to spend the next 10 years stepping over corpses at Embankment station.

Fortune favours the Fit.

Happy walking Wednesday

A xxxx