I Bought Some Weights

I was caught in an ethical dilemma. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a gym and I was kind of missing it. However I wrote a blog about not going to the gym and I made a valid point that not going to the gym was actually good for my comedy career. But you should never discount just how narcissistic I am. On the other hand once I’ve made a decision I stick with it.

My stubbornness to stick by a decision long after I can remember any valid reason for making it is a trait that has some history. A good example occurred a little while ago when a friend asked me why I hate another comedian. Hate is a strong but appropriate word and I hate this man. He is Lex Luther to my lycra body suit with a cape. Yet, when asked why I hated him I couldn’t for the life of me remember the reason. I have hated him for so long now that it’s second nature. All I know is that I must have had a good reason when I started hating him so I continue to hate him almost out of loyalty to my previous decision. I’m the same with my refusal to own a wheelie suitcase. I know they make perfect sense and they’re so much easier but I simply refuse to own one, I’ve always refused to own one and I’ll be carrying my luggage on my shoulder until the day I die.

My point is that joining a gym was out of the question. Even if I hadn’t written a blog on why I won’t go to a gym, I also found out that gyms cost a lot of money in Australia and I’m one for avoiding spending money at every opportunity. But like I so perfectly said before, you should never discount just how narcissistic I am. So I decided to compromise and I bought a set of weights. 2 dumbbell bars, a long bar and 50kg of weights. They came as a set and they cost about 2 months gym membership. So I figured it saves me money in the long run and it saves me the time of going to and from the gym, time I can then use writing. There is no downside… almost.

I bought them from a sports store about five minutes away from my flat. Five minutes is officially not a journey that you are allowed to take a car to, even I know that, so I walked. I paid for the weight set, the nice boy who works in the shop helped me carry them down the stairs at the front of the shop. This is when I quickly realised that I was in trouble: I now had to walk home with 50kg of weights and a 183cm bar. This is the first purchase I’ve ever made that I should have spent several months training for.

The weight set came in a case that had wheels on the bottom of it. It was kind of like a wheelie suitcase, which I hate, but far enough away from the design of a wheelie suitcase for me to be able to use the wheels and keep my principles. There was no way I was going to get it home without the wheels so I had to suck it up and use the wheels anyway.

The case was much shorter than would have been ideal so I had to lean awkwardly to the side to drag it along the footpath, up and down the curb, across the road and then up a hill. All the time holding this almost 2 metre metal bar aloft, like a beacon alerting all around me to my poorly conceived purchase.

In hindsight, a suit was not the most appropriate attire to attempt this journey in. It was a warmish night and here’s a workout tip for you – a leather jacket doesn’t ‘breathe’ when you start to sweat. But I got it home anyway. I made it into the apartment building, up the lift and into the flat. I then had to pull all of the weights out of the case and carry them in several more manageable journeys up the stairs to the bedroom. All except for one particularly stubborn 1.25kg weight that I had to literally crowbar out of the case. I am ashamed to say that I only resorted to using the crowbar after I broke a nail trying to pry it out (clearly I’m not ashamed enough to avoid mentioning it here).

As far as using the weights goes, I fully intend to. Just not yet. After that workout my whole body aches and I hurt my back dragging them home. If only I hadn’t written a blog about not going to see a physiotherapist.

NOTW

What have I taken from this News of the World scandal? Everyone has an opinion on it and the bandwagon is pretty full of people who are disgusted by it. Maybe I have a little bandwagon-fatigue on this story but I’m not quite as outraged as everyone else seems to be this week. That may be because, in my opinion, this has been a huge story for years now. Thanks to everyone for finally agreeing with me.

The fact that NOTW hacked the phones of people has been on record for a long time. Two people have served and completed prison sentences already. But no one seemed to care about this story when it was ‘only’ the royals, the famous and the politicians getting their phones hacked.

Why is that? Why has it only been since the families of victims of crimes had their phones hacked has it become such an issue? For example, John Prescott, the former Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Member of Parliament is reported to have been a victim of the NOTW. If a foreign government had been found to have hacked the Deputy Prime Minister’s phone (or even just highly suspected of it) this would be considered a serious act of espionage. Is it because we see him on the television that we don’t consider him to be an actual person?

That’s my conclusion from watching the storm of opinion on this. When the NOTW was hacking the phones of celebrities it didn’t matter because the general public doesn’t consider them to be real people. It was only when victims families, or ‘real people’, had their phones hacked that this became something that the general public cared about. I’m disgusted by the suggestion that the NOTW hacked the voice mail of families of 9/11 fire fighters and of child murder victims. But let’s not lose sight of all of the other victims in this story.

Another example, Gordon Brown may have had his phone hacked, so what, he was just the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the man who was guiding a G8 economy. He went on to be Prime Minister of Britain, was the phone hacking going on while he was in charge of a country? Should charges of treason start being talked about? The audacity to hack an elected leaders phone makes all of us victims and when our basic democracy is at stake, I’m paying attention.

I was appalled that the police refused to tell people who may have had their phones hacked and disgusted beyond belief that they refused to investigate this criminal activity. Their reasons, as far as I’ve heard, for not investigating it are a joke. It concerns me that the Met police considered it to be unworthy of their time. In today’s world, information is worth more than gold and the police force needs to take the theft of it seriously. But I was appalled and disgusted years ago!!!

Why don’t we consider people who are on the TV to be ‘real people’? This really concerns me. I may not like all of Hugh Grant’s films (although I have to declare a fondness for Notting Hill) but he’s a real person. He has the right to privacy too. The media has conditioned us to treat celebrities as commodities. Doing so makes it easier for us to justify trawling through their intimate details in the gossip section of the paper. Let’s be honest, we all read them and then deny doing so. Sure celebrities use the media to their advantage too and maybe there is a little schadenfruede in them being the victim of a beast that they feed but the fact remains, NOTW was a beast that everyone encouraged.

The celebrities wanted to be in the paper so that they could sell their products and then complain about how they’re always in the paper. Are all celebrities good people? Probably not, but since I haven’t met them all I’m not going to pass judgement.

Be honest, you wanted to know what (or who) that football player was doing when he wasn’t playing football and you only wanted to know so you could berate him for not being a role model. We love to watch people fail and the higher up the perceived food chain they are the more enjoyable it is watching their fall. But that doesn’t make us good people.

But when we realised that the NOTW was also trawling through the intimate details of the victims of some of the worst crimes of our lifetimes we couldn’t deal with that. We haven’t been conditioned to treat them as a commodity. We treated them as human beings, with real feelings, who were victimised by a news organization simply for being victims. We, as a society, reacted in the right way and demanded justice. My gripe isn’t with the publics’ reaction to these revelations, but with the publics’ failure to react in a similar way when it was Sienna Miller’s phone messages.

People only bought the NOTW because it was full of juicy gossip that no other paper had. Now you get to be angry with them because they did naughty things to get the information that you wanted. If people hadn’t encouraged the NOTW then maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Or maybe we could have stopped them a long time ago by being outraged when it was ‘only’ the famous people who were the victims

Physiotherapy

Physiotherapy is a valid practice. There, so don’t sue me; I don’t want to get into the whole Simon Singh lawsuit territory. So for the record I’m not saying that physiotherapy is hogwash or lacking in any scientific merit… I will say that for me, currently, I just can’t see the point of going to see a physiotherapist.

Yesterday I went for a jog before work. I didn’t go for any grand purpose; I simply thought it would be a good way to start the day. I just downloaded a heap of teach-yourself-French podcasts and since they’re about 20 minutes long I thought it would be nice to go for a 20 minute run and listen to one of them. Anyway, on my run I seem to have pulled my calf muscle. Not badly but it’s a bit sore and I’ve got a slight limp because of it.

Someone I work with suggested that I should go to ‘the physio’. When I asked why, he said that they would give it a good massage and with a bit of rest it’d be better again in a week. Thing is that I’m sure it’ll be fine in a week if I just rest it, no need for the physio. Sure, it would probably heal slightly faster if I went to the physio, but really, what’s the point?

I’m not a professional athlete. I’m a comedian. I walk 5 feet from the back-stage to the microphone and then I pretty much stand still for 20 minutes. Physio’s cost money and being nimble is simply not a necessity for me. Sure I can’t go running for a week, but running is actually quite hard and sitting on the sofa listening to my podcasts is much much easier.

Here in Australia being sporty and active is seen almost as an obligation. Given that Australia is now the second most obese country on the planet it’s obviously not a binding obligation. But, by the people who aren’t clinically chubbified, doing sport is something you’ve got to do and do regularly. Hence physiotherapy has blossomed in Australia.

I was speaking with a physio from Belgium a few months ago (we were having a chat while drinking beer in a completely non-physio way) and she said that physiotherapists in Australia are the highest paid in the world. That’s not a verified fact and I was quite drunk at the time, but the way physiotherapists are talked about in conversation amongst the sporty people I know you’d think they were deities in some unholy Nike religion.

Everyone ‘has’ a physio and people are always willing to recommend a good physio to those heathens, such as myself, who don’t ‘have’ a physio of their own. It’s like Scientology and Amway rolled into one – for every loser you sucker in you get to move up the pyramid to an injury free paradise.

Well Australia, I’m not joining your cult. I hurt my leg and I’m fine with it. Sure I won’t be able to go for a run for a week and I’ll just have to deal with that. I’m going to take the money I would have spent on physiotherapy and I’m going to go to my church – the pub.

Moving

Over the past year we have moved a lot. We sold our place in London and moved to the other side of London. Then we sent all of our belongings to the other side of the world and travelled through China for 3 months. Then we landed in Perth, put our stuff in a car and drove to the other side of Australia. That was all stressful. But I don’t remember any of it being as annoying as last weekend when we moved 3 blocks across Sydney.

When we moved across London we hired 2 Polish men with a truck, and some very questionable personal hygiene habits, to move our belongings. When we moved across the world we just put our stuff in boxes and someone came to pick it up. When we moved last weekend we did it all ourselves. I have never wanted 2 Polish men with questionable hygiene habits more than I did last weekend.

I say that we did it ourselves; my cousin helped. He was a lifesaver because there was no way we could have done it without him. Helping you move is the type of thing that you can only ask family to help with. A good friend will help you bury a body but when you need to move house they’re nowhere to be seen.

We really needed my cousin’s help too. Before you read the next sentence I want to make it clear how much I love my wife, she is amazing and I’m a better person because of her. But she is marginally stronger than an 11-year-old schoolgirl, which isn’t overly helpful when it comes to moving a fridge. So I needed my cousin’s help with the big things.

When you’re looking around the place you’re moving out of it all seems so simple. A couple of car trips and it’ll be done. You convince yourself that since you got it all in there it’ll be easy to get it all out. What you forget is that you got it all in there over the course of several months or years and you bought a new item of furniture to fill a need on average about once a month. But when you’re moving out you have to move it all in a weekend and that’s a whole new level of stupid.

We got it done and it’s all in. We hired a van for the big things and my cousin worked his butt off to help us. He’s not drinking alcohol for the month of July so I couldn’t even take him for a beer to say thank you. Instead I bought him a box of chocolates which is the type of gift you give to someone when you realise you only ever buy people booze these days and you’ve forgotten what the other acceptable forms of gifts are.

For those of you who are going to be moving house in the near future I have some words of advice for you – pay someone else to do it for you!! I know you think you can do it yourself and question if it’s worth the extra money to pay people to do it for you… it is, trust me.

If you ignore the above advice and still want to do it yourself then, in no particular order, here is a list of helpful tips for moving house:

• Bend from the knees – if you hurt yourself on the first trip you’ll have to hire someone else anyway.
• Buy furniture with wheels – it’s probably a bit late for this now that you’ve already decided to move but our fridge is missing a wheel and believe me when I say that I really missed that wheel.
• Try to avoid an argument with your partner early in the day – you will eventually have an argument but if you have it early then the rest of the day is awkward.
• Be realistic in your assessment of how much you can carry – it may take an extra trip and it may hurt your ego but if you drop the television because you were trying to balance it on the sofa you’ll regret it more than a little bruising of the ego.
• If your partner asks you to pose while you’re holding the washing machine so they can take a photo of you then you are allowed to start the inevitable argument early – recording moments with a camera is never a welcome distraction when you’re trying to lift something twice as heavy as you can possibly manage.
• Move embarrassing items before your relative comes around to help you – sure you may like to wear the superman outfit during sex but even the most gullible relation will eventually become suspicious when they find it in the draw with the wrist restraints.

Next time you’re thinking of moving you should make a list of all of the reasons for moving. Take your time composing this list and make it as exhaustive as possible. Then think very carefully about how heavy all of your stuff is and I bet you’ll conclude that staying put is probably the best option after all.

I’ll tell you more about our new place in the coming weeks…