Going to the gym is enjoyable enough. I try to go at least three times a week to the pleasantly eccentric one at the White Hart Hotel, near to where I live in Lewes, UK. The treadmill run can seem at times like the kind of punishment  once doled out on a prison sentence with hard labour, but, mostly, I enjoy the adrenalin flow you get from pushing yourself that bit further each time and, of course the feeling you get when it’s over. My companion in these adventures is my iPod – already old technology, it seems, but one of my best friends, when I’m travelling or when I’m running.

I always take time to plan what I am going to listen to at the gym each week – usually deciding on one album that I will get to know all the better from these repeat performances. At times it turns the gym into a sacred temple – maybe that is what gyms are in modern times.

Last week my album was the hypnotic and quietly melancholy new album, Pagan, from a young English one-man band known as Palmistry. Palmistry is quintessentially English with his lightly limpid  voice and gentle sensitivity but where he is musically new to my ears is the way he uses and transforms Caribbean traditions into an exquisite hybrid, substituting tightly controlled but delicate rhythms for the more extroverted beat we associate with reggae.

I’ve loved this music. It has helped too when I was reaching exhaustion point at the end of a run.

Over the weekend, I found time to sit in the garden and read the latest issue of The New Yorker, always a pleasure even though the US, just like us here in the UK, is going through a difficult and worrying time in its history. Part of me felt guilty, the bit that wasn’t happy to be soaking up the sun in my small  urban garden. Guilty to be enjoying a lifestyle so different from many of the people described within those pages this week. I have made many enjoyable, stimulating and eye-opening trips to America over the years and, sitting there in my garden, I was taken back specifically to the time I spent in New York City in the 1990s (in my Sony Discman days) when I used to listen to what was a new phenomenon to my ears, American hip-hop.

I have been to the States a lot in my life as a TV producer and I haven’t always been there for its beauty or its excitement. I have seen, and photographed, many things in the USA that showed me that even my favourite countries have their downsides.

1990s rap music now reminds me of some difficult times over there but also the thrill of being out there on the streets where danger and excitement are often edgy companions.

So this week, my album has to be illmatic by the artist knowns as nas. Surely one of the best hip-hop albums ever – well certainly in my experience. I was reading about nas in a previous issue of The New Yorker and just had to dig it out again. It will, I hope, keep me running this week.

So if you want to hear something of what I’ve been talking about, here are two tracks from these two wonderful albums. Enjoy:

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As a youngish man in the early days of my career in television, I had the intriguing and unlikely job of having a breakfast meeting with one of the most talked-about of all British footballers, the legendary George Best. We were scheduled to meet in London at the decidedly posh restaurant in up-market department store, Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly. I arrived as myself, a media type, an unglamorous journo on day-release. He arrived with his current girlfriend, the then Miss World, the very beautiful Swedish actress, Mary Stävin, best known, perhaps, as one of the ‘Bond Girls’ in the James Bond movie, Octopussy.

The photograph above of George and Mary was taken that year and shows that they were, no exaggeration, a very handsome couple. Not only was I the odd-one out in the glamour stakes but I had no interest either in the Miss World contest or football.

Strangely, we all got on really well – well enough for me to tell George that I was hoping to get fit and had recently started going to a once-a-week fitness class at the Stretford Leisure Centre in Greater Manchester. OK, I know, not very cool. The rest of the breakfast, when the work had been done, was devoted to this famous and now ( for a time) sober athlete giving me one-to-one advice on my fitness regime. He told me I was wasting my time only taking exercise once a week and, it was thanks to him, that I started the regular fitness regime that I have followed ever since that day. I owe it all to George.

I’ve been writing a lot of what is known as Fibonacci poetry in the last seven years and, recently, I’ve been fitting some of my television career memories into this toughly disciplined short form style where each line has to  conform to a strict syllabic count using the arithmetic code popularised in Europe by the medieval Italian mathematician, Leonardo Fibonacci. This weekend six of my new poems were published in the specialist Fibonacci journal,  Musepie Press’ The Fib Review, and one of them was my poem about George. My thanks, as always to Mary-Jane Grandimetti, the editor of The Fib Review, who has encouraged me since my early days as a poet and who has now published 49 of my Fibs in 16 consecutive issues of her great journal.

Here is the page featuring my George Best poem but, for the rest of my Fibs and for many more by other poets, click on the link below:

http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/index.html

If you’re a real glutton for punishment, click on the writer archive section and you’ll find links to all 49 of my Fibonacci poems.

Meanwhile, I have to start thinking about #21 of The Fib Review hoping to come up with something to send in  next time.

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After a good week weight training at the gym, I have a rest weekend ahead – well, a physical rest maybe….

… I won’t be lifting any more weights until Monday….

I’ll try not to be running around much either…

…it will be feet up but it will be work just the same. I’m off to do a rather intensive poetry weekend workshop. Weight-training, by comparison, would be a walk in the park.

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I’m in a rush today so apologies to all my readers. Today is no breakfast, no coffee and last night was no alcohol. I’m off to the gym, feeling remarkably cheerful,  for my fitness assessment after the first period of my new regime comes to an end. This programme, five days on and two days off,  of anaerobic interval training and weights with alternate days running on the treadmill has certainly got me going again. I follow the weight training three times a week with  half an hour of stretching and then practice my kungfu patterns.

Today I shall find out just how much, if at all, my strength and flexibility has improved so I’m off now to meet up with Phil my fitness instructor. I wonder if the Bodystat testing machine will look like the sinister Zander device above. I’ll let you know how I get on but not until I’ve had myself a strong cup of coffee.

I’m back, coffeed and pleased to find that all that exercise is beginning to pay off. I was attached to a device known as a Bodystat with electrodes attached to two points on my hands and feet and I lay still on a mat – narrowly avoiding falling asleep.

It is a painless and sensation-free experience that measures vital statistics like the body’s percentage fat, leanness and water content.

I was pleased to find out that, after all that exercise, my body fat percentage is lower (by a few percentage points) and my muscle percentage is correspondingly higher and water content is fine. I am   four points away from the recommended percentage so I’m on my way.  It would have been awful to find I had put on fat in the last two months but then again Christmas feasting must have had some impact. I shall meet up again with my trainer Phil on Wednesday and start a new weights regime. Onwards and upwards! Now, I think, another cup of coffee.

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I know I don’t work down the mines and that I’m a lucky guy who manages to spend most of his time writing in the beautiful little Sussex town of Lewes but it has still been an oddly exhausting week. First there were those dental “procedures” – two of them – where I had injections that nearly numbed the whole of Lewes let alone my face.

I also had to give away most of the blood in my right arm for a series of blood tests. The nurse apologised for going in “so deep” but apparently my veins are shy private things reluctant to give up their contents. Who can blame them.

I had my first ‘flu jab too –  I  know I’m too young to qualify for it but the doctor says he will make an exception of me due to all my “chronic illnesses  – charming. So now it was my left arm’s turn. I didn’t realize that the jab made you feel ill or that it makes your arm ache. It’s still a good thing though, I assume.

Then I had to visit my doctor for some more invasive stuff and a blood pressure test. All things considered, I came out of it with a comparatively clean sheet for a semi-brain-damaged, marginally epileptic neurotic.

I’m not so past it yet though that I couldn’t spend five days this week in maximum intensity weight training. No wonder then today, when I’m struggling to finish ten new poems for a November deadline that I feel, well, knackered. Poets can get tired too, you know, but I just heard two more of my poems are about to be published, so I’m not complaining. Coffee time.

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I have been going to gyms for a very long time now. When I was younger it was a great place to get fit if you didn’t have any natural ability at sport. You just did your weights and, well, waited for the results.

After some time, I got quite flexible if not actually skilled.

After all these years, I have got quite used to even the most complex gym equipment…

..and find none of them embarrassing to use in public…

…it feels good to stretch your legs every now and then…

…sometimes going to the gym is like a ride in the park…

…it can be quite relaxing if you have the right attitude…

…just let the weights take the strain…

…whilst you just lie their listening to your iPod…

…or think about that pint and a pie that you have earned with all this exercise…

…admittedly sometimes it can be a tad undignified…

…and can stretch you to your limits….but it is all quite safe when you do it under the gaze of an energetic personal trainer. I’m glad to be back again at full-tilt after my recent bout of ‘flu. You should try it too sometime.

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OK, I know they look naff, those mobile phone photos with sad-looking geezer, looking at phone looking at mirror image down the gym, but, hey, everyone else does it, so why not me too!

Going to the gym is a psychologically delicate habit for me – I have been doing the old fitness circuit in these places for decades, mostly pretty regularly, but every now and then I just drop out of it and sink into an unfit stupor. I’ve been like it for a couple of months now and I’m sure my closest friends can see the difference even if they are too kind to give me a detailed run down on my physical condition. So I thought I would make a statement with my beloved iPhone as my witness.

So, yes folks, I’m back.

I’ve been down to my local gym – just minutes away from my house, every day this week for a forty minute, non-stop aerobic routine involving some of the machines you can see in these crappy photos – cross-trainer, treadmill, cycle and, my special favourite, the rowing machine.

This is followed by some sit-ups and stretches some of them learned in China on a memorable trip four years ago. It feels good so far….the old adrenalin is flowing again along with the endorphins and I am beginning to get that great sense of euphoria that you get when you’ve pushed yourself to the top of your capabilities. So, if you are my friends, remind me of this whenever I say I’m going to give up again.

Now that the snow has gone, I’m also back ou in my garden for my kungfu practice – who knows, I might even get my old fitness back. I do also feel knackered, of course, so I’m looking forward to the planned two days off this weekend.

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