The Camera Never Lies. It Fibs.
When, ten years ago, I pondered asking the Karcher power washer people to sponsor my blood pressure, I went to the doctor who told me to lose weight. I considered joining a gym, but that consideration lasted nanoseconds when I remembered how much I hated school P.E. lessons. I tried jogging but found that I spent most of my time thinking about how far I was running and actually counting the lampposts I passed on each street. In the end, I decided to stick to the form of exercise I liked most: walking. To make things a little more challenging I decided on a daily conquest of one the steep Wade roads that led from my house in Inverness and up past Milton of Leys and into Daviot Woods. My first attempts were breath-taking. So much so, that I barely managed a few hundred yards. By the end of that first week, though, I was reaching the top of the hill and already the weight was starting to fall off. Suddenly, I was addicted to this walk and, being a tight-fisted so and so, congratulated myself on all the cash I was saving by not joining a gym.
After the first month I had lost a stone and the same happened the month after that and the month after that. After six months, I had lost more than five stone and my doctor congratulated me on my efforts as she declared my blood pressure – and a few other assorted ailments – were now under control.
I’ve let things slip from time to time, but the experience gave me confidence that, whenever my weight started to climb towards those old Michelin Man levels, I knew what I needed to do to sort things out.
Which is where I am today with the bathroom scales telling me it’s time to get back on that hill and cut out some of the sugary nonsense I've been scoffing since the summer. Alas, here at the high point of my girth is when my friends at Paths for All decided to feature my walking for health story in their new online exhibition Humans of the Walk. I had hoped they might ask for an old photograph of me because I’d have chosen that one where, if you squint, I look like James Bond striding across the beach in Jamaica. Well, maybe in my imagination. Instead, a new up-to-the minute photograph was commissioned with me standing on a footbridge at the Ness Islands looking wistfully towards the river (or the pastry-laden coffee shack) . I tried as best I could to disguise my bulk under a distracting red jacket, but, as they say, the camera never lies. It just fibs a little.
Besides, it’s not as if that photograph was going to make headlines, was it? Unless you include this piece in the Sunday Post. Yikes.
JZ