I’ve been exercising for the past couple of weeks.

This isn’t the kind of sentence I get to write very often as twenty-one years of medical crises and gluttony has left me with the sporting prowess of a toadstool. But as the weather’s been nice, and as I’m currently straddling the abyss between “he could do with losing a few pounds” and “this man could only be more physically repellent if he were to smother himself in bile and laugh at his own farts”, I thought it was finally time to stretch my withered limbs.

I’m not entirely certain how it got to this stage. Only a few years ago I was a strapping teenage lad who could eat an entire herd of cattle without any detrimental effects, but now it’s as if someone made a waxwork of that youngster in 2004, then invited a group of schoolchildren to visit it every day to punch it in the face and staple lumpen shards of low-grade meat to its body. I had to take action before I ended up looking like Bertie Bassett moonlighting for Danish Bacon.

A trip to the sports shop was a grim inevitability. I had my old school gym kit in the cupboard but I refused to put that on in case I reawakened the repressed memory of the tyrannical Mr. Fraser, a man who greeted my lamentable attempts to climb a rope with such crimson-faced fury that anyone would think I’d mistakenly traded his last living relative as livestock. You can climb ropes as much as you like, Mr. Fraser, you’ll still be just as lonely at the top.

Anyway, the sports shop. It may have become clear by now that this isn’t my natural habitat. I lumbered from rail to rail of nylon, my globular belly resting in its pie-stained hammock, feeling like a man who had finally plucked up the courage to go to a sexual health clinic about a worrying rash. I wasn’t entirely sure what to get, so I just picked up a football shirt and the longest shorts I could possibly find. I thought this was for the best as my legs are so pale, dusty and underused that, if I were to expose them to the sun, they would most likely explode like a Victorian flour mill.

With my shiny new clothes and a fiery loathing for the sight of my own reflection, I now had everything I needed to start my exercise regime. I planned to start sensibly and run a mile, people do that every year for Sport Relief and it all seems like a great laugh with people laughing and skipping along in elaborate costumes which cost five times the amount they’ve managed to raise for charity. The actual reality is nothing short of hellish.

I could run for about thirty metres, at which point it felt like my internal organs had all simultaneously decided to fight each other. I could scarcely breathe, I could taste blood and the only place to run around here is a local nature reserve which contains more insects per square metre than the I’m A Celebrity supply cupboard. I swear I swallowed so many live flies that my first-born child will have wings.

This has left me with a problem. I’m in no hurry to repeat this experience, yet the urgency of it grows ever more pressing. The government has spent millions trying to discover the cause of rising obesity in Britain, but I can tell you why that is right now. Exercise is too f***ing hard.

More Jamie:

......on Celebrity Deaths

.......on Big Brother

Image courtesy of Prisoner 5413