Things men do

It has been a long day, and I am writing this just after five in the morning having arrived home from work. We have taken the dogs out and had a shower, and I am writing to you now because I have had computer Issues on the taxi rank, and hence have only just got to this.

Fortunately we didn’t get up very early. We were in bed and just starting on the first steam-your-eyes-open coffee at about eleven today when the phone rang.

It was Number One Daughter, very pleased with herself because she is in some sort of championship cross fit adventure in Ireland, and after the first event was in second place.

She is very keen on this cross fit thing. It is something she has taken up since she has been in the Army, where, as you might recall, she is one of about half a dozen women in the special lunatic section of the military called the All Arms PT Corps, for which you have to carry the sergeant on a stretcher round a fifty mile run on your own, or something, in order to qualify.

I regard soldiers as shining examples of glowing fortitude, strength and agility. Number One Daughter considers most of them to be unfit layabouts and her occupation is to bully them into exhausted efforts round assault courses and similar. After she has spent her days bounding about doing this sort of thing she rushes off to a gym and does what she considers to be proper training, for cross fit, which takes hours and makes me feel slightly unwell just to hear about it.

Cross fit has been invented since my youth and so I do not really understand what it is all about, and I imagine that had it not been for Number One Daughter I would never have heard of it at all. However it seems that what you do is all sorts of different unpleasant and exhausting activities, weight lifting and gymnastics and jumping on and off things and running about.

It may be apparent to the reader that I am no authority on the topic, and indeed I am not. I have had it explained to me over crackly phone lines by impatient young people several times and in the end it has just been simpler to nod and just agree. We have looked up terms like ‘muscle up’ and ‘clean and jerk’ online to improve our understanding of what on earth she is going on about, but we are beginning to participate in the classic Old Person Condition: that the longer life trundles on the less of it seems to be sensibly comprehensible.

The upshot of it all was that she is doing very well in the competition to see who is the cross fittest, and after that the day was punctuated with exciting updates, either from her over the phone, or on the computer or from other interested parties on Facebook. As I write she is still second and there is another day to go tomorrow.

We are very proud of her being so very fit, especially as the muscle-bound custodians of the PamperMe Wellness Holistic Health Spa where we swim, all follow her successes with interest, and consider me to be a bit fit just by association, that is, they forget that I am a rotund idle person deserving of the contempt of all youthful fitness enthusiasts, as I appear inexplicably to have produced a glamorous hero of their generation. This is nice, and also handy if I want a second towel.

After she had phoned we were inspired to do some exercise ourselves, so we took the dogs for a stroll round the Library Gardens. We were going to make an early start at work, but by the time we had made sandwiches and a flask we had yawned so much that it was perfectly plain that it just wasn’t going to happen, so we went back to bed, where we slept soundly despite Oliver and his friends dashing in and out of the garden yelling and laughing, and making the dogs bark with all the excitement.

When we got up most of the day seemed to have bypassed us. Mark went off to bash the poor camper van back together so that we could go away tomorrow, and I tootled off down to Bowness to listen to the blokes gossip on the taxi rank, and raise some cash to pay school fees, which was pleasant, especially because I had some nice olive bread sandwiches and the autobiography of Gordon Brown’s wife to keep me entertained.

The day ticked along without much incident, as days do, except that the very last customer of the night was a girl whose girlfriend who was trying to get changed into a boyfriend had just been arrested outside the wheelhouse. She was very upset that her friend had been bundled into a van and taken away.

I tried to suggest that it might not entirely be just because she was a lesbian, but perhaps because we had all seen her assaulting a police officer, but she didn’t really believe me.

“It is so unfair,” she grieved sadly, “it’s because she does the things men do. People can’t accept it coming from a girl. They ought to be kinder.”

I thought of Number One Daughter – and, come to that, Number Two Daughter, who plays international rugby – and made a mental note that if you saw a girl doing things men did then you should be kind to them.

I quailed at the thought.

(The picture is the girls in her heat at the last competition. She is on the front row, second from the right.)