Grapevine To The Right...

Today I went to the Athletics Centre. Despite having lived in and around Oxford for eight years, I don't know if Oxford even has an athletics centre, and I lived next door to the (noisy) college sports ground for months without even knowing it was there, with the odd jog along a picturesque towpath as my spasmodic concession to the need for cardio-vascular health. The sports centre here is enormous and unlovely (as you can see) and situated right in the middle of the campus, so there is no escape from a choice between exercise and guilt at not exercising. They also make it unreasonably easy by running a massive variety of classes, at all times of the day, which are free to University members, and for men and women of all ages, so one isn't intimdated into atrophy by oceans of improbably flexible PE majors. Above all there is the primal draw of highly rhythmic music, by which I am readily hypnotised into forgetting that I am sweating and in pain. As a consequence of all this, I have a made a find. They are called abs. I suppose I had been notionally aware of something separating my intestines from the layer of superadipose fat, but I wouldn't have gone so far as to call them abs. Now I have willed control of them. Extraordinary. These illustrious seats of learning really do exist to fuel the thrill of discovery. Next I would like to discover a means by which I can replace my precipitous heels after aerobics without hobbling agony. A litter, perhaps?