Ian McMillan: Cautionary tale of a teacake jogs my memory

GATHER round, my friends, and I’ll tell you A Cautionary Tale. This tale is almost Shakespearean in its sweep, and Homerically epic in its reach. It features chips. It features sand. It features t-shirts gallantly trying to contain bellies. It features the gritting of teeth. It features the light being blocked out. Above all, it features the kind of nagging and constant pain that my mother called a Naig.

My lovely wife and I have just been on holiday and when I’m away I like to, as it were, loosen my braces. I like to indulge. I munch a slab of cake. I enjoy fish-and-chips-bread-and-butter-cup-of-tea at a seaside café. I spread butter lavishly and lumpily on my bread, something I don’t allow myself to do at home.

So there we are in a tearoom and I’m devouring a toasted teacake speedily like I’m in a toasted-teacake-eating contest; my chin is crumby and there’s butter on my shirt and frankly I don’t care. I’m on my jollies. I slave all year over a hot keyboard or a hot microphone so don’t deny me butter. Then it seems to go dark in the café; the sun goes in. That’s a shame because the weather’s been so lovely.

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And then a pregnant man walks past and that’s why the café’s gone dim: he’s been blocking out the light. Okay, he’s not really pregnant but he looks pregnant. The rest of him isn’t that fat but he looks like he’s on his way to the maternity ward and if he doesn’t waddle a bit faster he’ll end up with twins before he gets through the door. I glance around and I’m amazed. I know that obesity is an epidemic but here’s overwhelming first hand evidence of it in an ordinary English seaside town. Every man I see has a belly you could balance a pint pot on. Maybe it’s the fact that, like me, they’re released from the daily grind so they’re sporting leisurewear which tends to cling but I feel like I’m surrounded by people who are turning into barrage balloons. I suck my own stomach in and leave the crust of my toasted teacake at the side of the plate.

Back at the holiday cottage very early the next morning I decide to go for a walk on the beach; I slip out of the door and across the dunes and stroll on the flat sand in the morning sun.

The beach is deserted and the air is sweet and it feels great to be alive. I’m doing myself good. I’m preventing basket-ball-tummy syndrome. I feel my pace quickening, my walk becoming a power walk and then a thought occurs to me: why don’t I start running? There’s nobody to see me, nobody to laugh.

I remember my previous attempts at jogging, back in the late 1980s with my late brother-in-law Martyn. We drove to a secret location so that nobody in Darfield would see our knees. We stood at the side of the road in our shorts. We shambled and stumbled and broke into trotting down the deserted country road and we felt good.

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We quickened into the running equivalent of second gear, then third. Then, and I’ll never really know how this happened, a man drove up behind us. Bizarrely, he had a Tannoy on the roof of his car. I can tell you don’t believe me, but it’s true. “Get them knees up!” he shouted “Come on, get them knees up!” and then roared off into the distance. We stopped jogging and I’ve never jogged since.

Until that morning on that empty beach. I looked around for intruders with tannoys and then I began to run across the sand. I could hear my feet pounding and my breath heaving and my heart drumming. I felt great. I could feel any vestige of belly fading away. I ran and ran. I glanced up and I found that I’d run a bit further down the beach than I intended. Never mind: I turned round and ran back to the cottage where I ate a hearty breakfast. Like condemned men eat a hearty breakfast.

Later that day, I felt a twinge of pain in an undefined area around my ankle and my heel. I had to sit down for a minute, just for a minute, on a bench by the sea. I stood up after a bit and the pain returned like a tune you just can’t get out of your head. A constant Naig, in fact. I gritted my teeth and carried on walking. My wife asked if I was okay and I said that maybe we could just sit for a minute, just for a little minute and enjoy the view. And then I told her about the running.

I don’t know what the moral of the tale is. Walk before you can run, I guess. And keep away from the chips. And don’t think you’re younger and fitter than you actually are. I’ll have to stop now and tighten my strapping…

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