Food, Fitness, Fatness and Failure

Food is brilliant. It's the best thing ever invented.

As far as life-sustaining necessities go, it's second to none. Oxygen is alright. Don't get me wrong, breathing is jolly good fun and I'd miss it if I couldn't do it any more...if only because it'd take away my ability to sigh. Sighing is fantastic. A wonderful little action that can quickly and simply signify all of the important emotions. Disappointment, frustration, relief when something awful that's been happening has stopped happening. It's great.

But food is better.

I would quite happily spend 24 hours a day eating. If you had to ingest a cream cake as often as you drew a breath, I would be ecstatic. Left to my own devices, I would eat myself into a coma. I would eat until my head disappeared into my neck, my stomach enveloped my limbs and I became a massive sphere of blubber. And even at this stage, I would still keep eating. I would simply roll face-first onto cakes. I would become a filter-feeder. And I would be happy. At least my id would be happy. My ego and super-ego would be arguing over which one of them was the least happy and the most ashamed. With these kind of deep-seated conflicting natural tendencies it's difficult to maintain a good weight.

My Wii fit cheerfully informs me that I'm obese and that I should probably try to remedy this by swivelling an invisible hula-hoop around my waist or by making spastic jerking movements as I attempt to head pretend footballs into a pretend goal. If there's anything I hate more than real exercise, it's exercise that pretends to be fun. You're not fooling anybody. Like those audio tapes that put times tables to music - putting something horrible in a fun context doesn't make it fun. Painting Auschwitz pink and dressing the SS in squirrel costumes wouldn't have made a stay there any more pleasant.



Exercise + Computer Games does not = Enjoyment. It's still horrific. In fact it's even worse. It's wrapping something awful in something comforting, familiar and wonderful. It's like watching a variation of 2 Girls 1 Cup where the girls are played by Mr Spoon from Button Moon and Bagpuss. It's nightmarish.

In the case of Wii Fit, the playing experience is particularly reminiscent of a nightmare as characters or "Miis" you have created in the console take part in the games. I often find myself heading footballs kicked to me by Hitler whilst my mother referees. All I need to do is look down and realise I'm naked and the picture would be complete.

So Wii Fit can fuck off. Wii Sports is tolerable, but only because I can sit down and eat crisps whilst I'm playing it.



I'm sure it all stems from my hatred of sports at school. I wasn't by any means an athletic child. I was nearly always a good foot taller than my classmates and built like a nuclear chimney stack. I was always more comfortable with moving heavy furniture than moving myself. Shifting my body at any speed was like trying to push a Lancaster Bomber up the M40. This meant that my participation in team sports was not celebrated by my peers.

It wasn't like in other disciplines where your failures could be hidden. There you could hide the "D" on your essay beneath your pencil case and tell your classmates you "Did OK." Not so in P.E. Here your failures were all too apparent. You were naked (not literally...at least not after Mr Parker was fired) and worse still, your shortcomings would impact on the success of your peers.

If you were shit at football, in a 5-aside match your entire team was doomed to failure. It was like writing a joint-essay with 5 other people knowing full well that you were entirely illiterate and didn't know a pen from a peperami. The prose would flow beautifully until it came to your section where it would suddenly become unintelligible shaky scrawls and crayon doodles of farmyard animals. That was how I played football.

Consequently I have no interest in sport in either an observational or participatory capacity. Tell some people that you don't follow football, let alone support a specific team and they'll look at you like you've told them that you don't breathe oxygen.

But fuck them. I'm my own man these days and happily no longer fettered by their asinine standards or expectations. And anyway, I do breathe oxygen. It's my second favourite thing and it's more than enough exercise for my liking.

The Writing on the Wall

It is a sad fact that men seem to be at their most honest, thoughtful, artistic and organised when scrawling their thoughts on toilet walls. Whether overtly posturing their sexuality, posing whimsical philosophical conundrums or depicting their own genitals in crude felt-tip glyphs…it represents a level of expressionism scarcely seen elsewhere in male popular culture.

It is unfortunate that much of this work will be lost to the ages, like tears in rain or pus in custard. Toilet walls are notoriously difficult to collect and compile, largely due to their physical dimensions. Brick shit-houses for instance are renowned for their bulkiness… though it is likely that any collection of toilet wall artwork collected in its original form would be impractically huge. You could not, for instance, realistically transport a book with 8-foot concrete pages to a dinner party and regale the stuffy fuckers therein with carefully-selected drolleries. Certainly not without heavy-lifting equipment or at least an ingenious system of ropes and pulleys.

I shall therefore attempt to recount some of the best examples I myself have encountered during my time spent upon the shared ceramic stinker. This should hopefully prove to be of particular interest to ladies. I have spent reasonably little time in women’s toilets, but you don’t seem to express yourself in the same way. I should imagine that any wall-based musings are written in perfect, flowing prose by a dainty and accurate hand. But overall you seem to favour verbal communications rather than corresponding via text-based kludgie conflabs.

The male scrawlings can be divided into several categories:

THE PHILOSOPHICAL

Here we find such gems as “Some come here to sit and think, I come here to shit and stink”. This displays a cursory foray into existentialism, with a delicious dash of nihilism. It is self-deprecating, yet celebratory of shared animalistic necessity.

THE ACADEMIC

An esoteric off-shoot of the philosophical, this type of wall-writing is largely found in the conveniences of institutions of higher education. I am unsure whether it is still the case, but the walls of the gentleman’s toilets of Southampton University’s Avenue Campus were absolutely littered with dry literary and philosophical comments and allusions. Each of these was properly annotated and footnoted and subsequently proof-read, corrected for spelling and grammar and assigned a grade by the next toilet user.


The walls provided an essential forum for public thought – a meeting of minds. Unfortunately the entire collaborative collection of work was somewhat upstaged one fateful afternoon by the scrawling of “LOL FUCKING STUDENT CUNTS” in crude red marker, presumably by an outside visitor. Or a self-abasing insider.

ART

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. In the case of a picture of a spunking cock, I’d say it’s worth at least twice that.


Nothing affirms privacy of material surroundings than adorning them with a self-penned portrait of the most intimate of bio-functions. It also celebrates the dual-function of the male generative member in a place where it is in danger of becoming nothing more than a lowly waste-spewing appendage. In its other application it is the giver of life, the bringer of pleasure, the funky little giggle stick who longs to venture into the ladycupboard of squishy delights.

SIGNATURES

Similar to “ART”, this is a sub-category of scrawlings that reaffirm the man’s ownership of his private space. It also, however, acts as the most basic of affirmations of existence. A cry of “I AM HERE, I HAVE ACCOMPLISHED SENTIENCE AND SELF-ACTUALISATION.” Their existence will not be forgotten as long as future generations of bog users gaze upon their name as mud drops from their guts.

POLITICS

Quite a rarity, but the few examples I have found represented some of the most incisive and cutting political commentary in our culture today.


I wish I had seen it myself, but a friend alerted to me the following simple yet brutal piece: “FUCK BLAIR (TONY)”. There is no subterfuge here. The writer was not hiding behind allegory and metaphor. This is balls-to-the-wall stuff. Biting satire that doesn’t talk down to its audience and yet eliminates any possible misinterpretations.
There is no way that we could mistake this for an attack on Exorcist actor Linda or dancing light entertainer Lionel. This is a punishing and accurately-guided cry of defiance aimed at the very top. I only hope if this particular artist is still working in the medium of marker pen, he updates the legend to “FUCK BROWN (GORDON)”, lest we think his ire has been sparked by mystical triangular-headed sorcerer Derren, Whitney-buggering triangular-haired R&B superstar Bobby or even the colour brown.

NETWORKING

I work at the Royal Free Hospital, and this is without a doubt the most commonly-seen wall art in our conveniences. It prizes function above form and is largely administrative in nature. There is one person identifiable by his invariably poorly-spelled missives who is continually trying to arrange a meeting for what he terms as "DIRTIE COCK FUN”. If he had a little more sense, he would realise that
1. Toilet walls are not an efficient forum for ascertaining availability of other parties – he would be far better creating a mail-merge of e-mailing en-masse.
2. Appearing as they do on the walls of a men’s rest-room, very few ladies are going see his messages! Silly sausage.

TRUCKER ART

This is confined to the stained, cratered walls of conveniences in truck stops, truckers cafes and the occasional motorway service station. Prone to bouts of insanity and sociopathic rage, truck driver art is understandably dark in tone. Writings may well lament their loneliness, their penchant for prostitution, child homicide or other activities that preclude them from stopping at more civilised cafeterias such as Little Chefs, etc.
Drawings are often Blake-esque and can prove to be useful tools in the retrospective psychoanalytical procedures involved in the criminal investigations resulting from their rampages.

FOOTBALL

As if droning on about it in verbal conversations wasn't enough, men are renowned for recording their opinions on their most / least favourite football teams and players on the walls of their shitters. I am unsure as to why anyone would choose such a public (yet antithetically private) forum to offer the view that "UNITED ARE BEST" as it invariably draws criticism from others who do not agree. They may think that "CITY ARE THE BEST" and "UNITED", far from being the "BEST", are a bunch of "FUCKWIPES".

It seems to be an argument with no scope for appeasement or resolution. I should imagine it's something to do with exercising deep-seated tribalistic tendencies, but I know as much about football as an earwig knows of the Russian Ballet.

Please don't tell any of my fellow toilet users, though...lest they suggest that I use the ladies instead.