Last night, I failed to make it to the gym. That’s not interesting, I know – not only because it happens to most people, most of the time, but also because the gym is the second-dullest place on the planet, after any room in which a TV is showing Downtown Abbey.
I apologise: I know a tedious opening line like that kills a story point-blank, and that I may as well save myself an hour, file a little doodle to my editor instead and trot off to the Captain’s Arms. But bear with me.
I’m new to the UAE (five weeks, six days), and I have already developed an enemy: the chair. My chair-nemy, if you like that kind of thing. Because the first thing I discovered here is that the world actually does revolve around me (see, Mum?) and if I want to spend every waking minute in a seated position, I can. Fancy a coffee? I’ll just call that in. Lunch? The meals have wheels. Time to clear my desk of dirty plates? Oh, you’re taking them, thank you. And now, as karma/science would have it, I’ve put on a few kilos. I blame my chair.
I’m reminded of an article I read a while ago, which claimed that sitting is the ‘new smoking’ – and that people who spend six hours a day parked on their behind increase their risk of dying of heart disease by 18 per cent. Sobering, for us queens of the couch.
So in a bid to, ahem, exercise those demons, I enforced some lifestyle rules to curtail my early departure from this earth. One: walk to work. That’s a stupid rule (I live opposite the office) so I scribble in ‘extend walk to work’. Now, in the oddest routine I’ve ever adopted, I do three turns round the block before ending up where I started, crossing the road and entering my office like a human Pac-Man.
The second rule was to stand up to pop my waste paper in the recycling bin, not wheel my way over on my chair, because that habit is the epitome of slovenliness. Done.
The third: spend 15 minutes a day in the gym. High-octane, in and out before you can say ‘body mass index’. When the gym is two storeys below your apartment, and you can get there in 47 seconds, there is no excuse to bail out.
Turns out Rule 3 is not that easy. Yesterday, for the fifth night in a row, I simply couldn’t muster the momentum to drag my body 10 steps to the lift, push a button, take 15 steps the other side and lift myself on to the treadmill. My new sofa had me on lockdown. The chair is against me in my battle against sedentary contentment. Have I really become lazy? Or are all the chairs in the UAE conspiring together towards a dark, unknown purpose? I think so.
Confucius probably once said you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer, and this sounds like solid advice to me. So until I figure out how to defeat this seat of evil, I’ll be nurturing a love/hate relationship with padded furniture. If anybody wants me, I’ll be on my chair.
