There was a wonderful documentary a few years ago about the phenomenon of ‘fatty feeding’. Where normal, thin, regular people enable seriously obese people (normally their partners) to consume masses. They encourage them. They buy them ‘little treats’, like a sack of cream doughnuts, a wheelbarrow full of bacon sandwiches, even though they know that its killing them. But its not, apparently, in the world of the super-obese, an uncommon situation. Its like buying a recovering alcoholic a bottle of whisky and making him drink.

Or like buying Mel a fit-bit for her birthday. It just encourages obsessive behaviour. And makes everything worse. But what do you buy your wife for her birthday???

So I thought, I know, she’ll love one of those (really annoying) wrist things that count your steps during the day, monitor your sleep patterns during the night and quantifies all manner of health and fitness shit.

Mel is fit. She swims 80 to 100 lengths four mornings a week, she does two spin sessions a week from which she returns home disguised as a little soggy red-faced thing. And of course, she does pilates. Everyone SHOULD do pilates, but only the dedicated few really do. You have to want to contort your body where, at almost any age, it really doesn’t want to go. You need to crave a degree of suppleness that you’re never going to re-gain and you need really to be a middle-aged, middle-class Londoner. Fortunately I don’t do facile stereotyping.

And we walk, of course. We walk a lot. Though not necessarily when its minus 5 and snowing. Then we do more sitting.

So we strapped the fit-bit on and downloaded the inevitable app and its really… really there. And great. And the next day I come home from work to find my wife pacing the kitchen. Because she’s nearly reached her ‘target’ for steps but not quite. At which point I realised I was the health’n’safety version of a ‘fatty feeder’, enabling and encouraging obsessive behaviour. Albeit of a ‘better’ version than the chocolate eclairs.

Jose Morinho is in a bad place. Maybe a fit-bit would help him? I don’t know. Leaving the country would certainly be good for the rest of football, but meanwhile he’s here, he’s unhappy and he’s managed to take Manchester United, the ‘biggest team in the world’, the veritable metaphor for hard but glamorous attacking football, and turn them into Stoke City, parking buses all over the City. Well, his half of the city. Guardiola in the other half of Manchester is doing simply wonderful things, to further rub Morihno’s nose in it. But then he publicly attacks his team. “No personality, no fight, no nuffink…”. Strange choice of words. He should have signed Bruce Forsyth, while he was still alive, if he wanted ‘personality’. Maybe Ant’n’Dec if they’re available and out of rehab. But footballers? He’s already making his excuses for another shitty season (relatively) and trying to distance himself from any responsibility. He is definitely my ‘tosser of the week’. And most weeks.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx