2005-04-11

Several items to bring to the attention of the Committee:

a) Yesterday I passed a car with a yellow diamond-shaped sign in the rear window reading ‘Tiny Person on Board’. Cool! I thought. Like a midget? Or a leprechaun? until I realized that they were merely showcasing their offspring. I hate those signs anyway. Do you really think that someone who is gung-ho to give you a bit of the old Ben Hur will see your little sign and go “Oh my God! They are carrying precious human cargo!” and graciously wave you on? Fuck off. ‘Baby on Board’ signs are more obnoxious than those maternity T-shirts that read ‘Baby’ with an arrow pointing down, which should really read ‘It’s Not My Fault I’m Fat’.

b) It’s NOT my fault I’m fat, because fitness magazines for women are a joke. To be more accurate, they are a nonentity. They are mythical, like leprechauns. Perusing the gigantic magazine aisle at Asda, the closest thing I could find was ‘Diet and Fitness’, which contained nothing but creepy testimonials from frowsy housewives about how their dramatic weight loss had Changed Their Lives (“My husband didn’t want to go out in public with me when I was overweight, but now that I’ve lost two stone he’s proud to be seen with me again!” NOTICE: Your husband is an antediluvian prick), and tips on how to do my makeup. Here’s a funny idea – I’m actually concerned about fitness, and not in the Darwinian ‘ripe for breeding’ sort of way. Men’s fitness magazines don’t seem to be much better: they have a few good weights routines, and then a lot of advice about locating the G-spot, which I fully support in the abstract but don’t find personally useful.

c) I am trying to get fit in order to quickly, silently and efficiently murder whichever of my neighbours VOMITED all over the communal bathroom and then sloppily mopped up, leaving a lingering reek of sick and visible splatters of puke on the toilet base and the walls. THE WALLS. What happened in there, an impromptu exorcism? Ye gods, I hate living in a bedsit. It’s like living in a dorm, except instead of virile young undergrads it’s full of shifty night workers who look as though they’re considering serial rape as their next logical career move.