Upstairs, Downstairs

Blood was 5.7 this morning, after oatmeal last night and no hint of exercise since.

Now, the thing I wanted to explain to you yesterday actually became a lot more relevant today, so that's all for the best (do you see, best Beloved, as Rudyard Kipling would probably say if he hadn't had a stroke and died).

The most cliched advice that every healthy living supremo will ever give you is "Instead of using the lift, why not take the stairs?" The obvious answer to this, if you're a fat fuck, is "because I want to neither die nor kill someone when I get there!"

Stairs, as inventions go, were always going to be a transitional technology. They were OK in principle as a way of getting to that whole other layer of living-space you had built on, but they were always crying out for something better to come along. Lifts, or elevators if you really insist, were it. These are a complete technology, a technology that sees a problem, and then fixes it, completely, without you having to lose a lung in the process.

When we went over to the States last February (before I'd started this experiment), we went out for lunch with Lori and Dominic, our friends over there. As it happened, we found a place to park in the almost-adjacent multi-story car park, and walked down many, many flights to get to the restaurant (a nice little Mexican that for reasons of comedy, is perhaps most widely known as Taco Slut). As we went down, and down, and down, like sinners having to find their own level in Dante's Inferno (If you haven't read it, do, it'll make you want to punch an Italian in the nose), I pondered the fact that what goes down...must, if it wants a lift back home, go up...when filled with Mexican food...

And so it proved. After the meal, when I was groaning with cheese-coated goodness, we faced the interminable climb back up to Heaven from Hell, flight after flight of concrete bastardy, until I thought it would be easier to just die, there and then, and not slow everyone else down.

d, I should say, had lost her two and a half stone not long before, and whereas previously, she could be relied on to be my partner-in-bitching, now she practically skipped up the bloody things, like a mountain goat on steroids, singing a happy tune as she did so. Something about raindrops on roses and other such nauseating twoddle (I may have been over-stating at this point - I could taste blood in my phlegm and there were pretty little dots in front of my eyes).

All of which is by way of saying that as of yesterday, I started taking the stairs if ever they presented themselves to me. Don't get me wrong, they're still a time-wasting exercise, and a transitional technology, and really, when all is said and done, a bit crap, but I've started taking them anyway, just...Because.

Mainly Because with the blisters, my actual exercise quotient will have to stay plummeted for at least another day (though I'm sure you'll all be glad - not to say enthralled - to know they're healing nicely thank you), but also, significantly, Because I can do it now. There are, depending on your reckoning, either three flights, or five stoops and a flight of stairs between the sensible Earth and my office - on the whole stoop-to-flight ratio, I'm with Paul Bratter in Barefoot In The Park - it may look like a stoop, but it climbs like a flight - and yesterday, trying out the novelty value of such a thing, I walked up them instead of taking the lift. In fact, as it happened, I walked up and down and up and paused and down them, doing errands each time.

Today, we had to load up a van and send it on its way to a show at which we exhibit, and once again, there were the stairs to go up and down and up and down and up and down. Now, I'm not gonna tell you I like it, cos that would be entirely perverse. I'm just saying, I can do it now without anything much more than the tingling of riding...say...half a mile in my thighs and my lungs. So there you go - look at me: I do stairs now.

And beetroot, probably. Never liked beetroot in my life, but yesterday, I had a weird little epiphany moment that said "Try it. You might like it..."

I get those moments from time to time, as though I'm unlocking a new level in Tony, the Wii game - It was that way with wine. And scallops. And lobster. And salads. Ad squid - though that was something of an expectation-failure, and I tried it, thought "wow, that's a lot for chewing for no tangible flavor-based reward," and quickly went back to being a non-squiddy kinda guy. So there you go - staircases and an openness to beetroot. What a lot of new things we're learning...