The Gym (again)

 

It’s about that time of year, when you have just finished the Christmas shop and you’ve got a cupboard stacked with delicious food – sounds perfect! You’re going to spend the next week sitting on your arse eating Christmas dinner, mince pies, chocolates, and drinking booze. Unfortunately, there is a price to pay – you’re going to get fat.
On New Year’s Eve you are going to get drunk and make some New Year’s Resolutions – remember the promises you made yourself last year? What about the one where you’re going to take out a new gym membership to help you lose weight.

Before making any rash decisions, you should first consult the Discussions with My Dog guidance notes.

In our previous blog – Dogs are a great motivator of sport – Daisy gave a very honest review of what the gym actually has to offer – see the link.

An average gym membership will cost you £50 per month. You’ve committed to going 3 times every week, so each visit works out about £4. That’s great value. Reality check – by March/April you might manage to drag yourself down there twice a month. Does £25 a visit still sound like great value?

You’ll have to get kitted out, so you’ll need a new pair of trainers (you’ve been wearing your current pair to work in the garden, and they are looking a bit knackered. You can’t possibly be seen in muddy scuffed footwear running on the treadmill). That’s going to set you back another £150.

The gym is usually full of people who exercise regularly and are in excellent physical shape. Guys who bench press 300 pounds, ladies who do a spin class back-to-back with an aerobics class and then a sun bed session - people who have no need to visit the gym. Compared to them you are going to look like an out of condition slob – is your self-esteem ready for that?

If it doesn’t work out, you can always cancel your membership – all you have to do is contact the call centre and ask for the cancellation’s team. Good luck with that – see the link to call centre blog.

Our final top tip is: save this link in your calendar to be read in the third week of December next year.

Alastair and Daisy

Pants

 

Regular readers of this blog will know that Daisy the dog does not like having a bath. In fact, she thinks that hygiene is very overrated. Does she have a point? Most people believe you should change your underwear every day. Here is the Discussions With My Dog top 10 tips why this might just be a misguided obsession with cleanliness.

1. In medieval times the King of the realm owned 6 pairs of pants. The noble classes, on average owned 4 pairs but common peasants only ever owned a single pair. Changing your pants every day was simply not an option.
2. For professional reasons - Superhero’s wear their pants over their tights, as an essential part of their costume. Imagine superman without his trademark red pants.
3. Also work related - professional wrestlers. The logistics of removing a 3-ounce pair of spandex pants from a 300-pound man who has just been involved in a sweaty wrestling match is not something you want to do every day.
4. The confused reason – you have several pairs of pants the same style and colour. If they don’t smell too bad how do you know when to change them?
5. Covid-19 lockdown reason – you have no idea what day of the week it is so how do you know when to change them?
6. The “can’t be arsed” reason – if you change them, you have to wash them, dry them, fold them and put them in the cupboard. Way too much effort every day.
7. In case you have an accident – every day you leave the house you have a 1 in 10,000 chance of being involved in a serious accident. A common reaction to impending serious injury is to soil yourself. Why would you risk messing up a clean pair of underwear under those circumstances?
8. As a school-boy - You have been the victim of an atomic wedgie. It’s not a case of not wanting to change your pants, you are going to need a surgical procedure to remove them from your arse crack.
   
9. The save the environment reason – every wash wastes valuable electricity and water.
10. They are your lucky pants – who can argue with that?

     Alastair and Daisy

The best and worst fashions of the ages

 

This week it’s FASHION WEEK at Discussions with My Dog – to be honest its more about when fashion goes bad. Daisy recently picked up an injury to her paw, and for her own protection, we bought her some dog boots. Daisy thinks dog boots suck and she has been on a major sulk for several days.

This got us thinking about styles that, when examined with the cold light of history, were proved to be something of a disaster.

Fashions are cyclical. You’ll notice commentators will say “the thirties look is back this year” etc. One era yet to make a come back is the 60’s/70’s. Extra wide collars and flares were never a good look. At it’s height, the flares just kept getting outrageously larger. The queue for the Saturday night disco looked like the start of a yacht race with all that fabric flapping around in the wind.

In 1973 there was an oil crisis, most Western economies went into recession and were only saved by cutting back on the massive cost of material necessary to make those flares and collars.

One of my least favourite fashions is what I call the ‘low gravity look’. This is a favourite among teenage boys who wear their trousers ridiculously low, well below the hips with several inches of underwear showing. Spoiler alert guys – in ten years you’ll look back at the photos and wonder why you went out in public looking as though you had taken a massive shit in your pants.  

Although Daisy abhors dog boots, there is one thing Daisy hates more: the medical collars dogs have to wear after an operation – the ones that resemble a lampshade. Back in Elizabethan times, an extended ‘ruff’ collar was considered the absolute height of fashion. The Elizabethans also invented voluminous puffle pants. I can’t offer an explanation for ruff collars but back in the 16^th century, there were no public toilets, so it was useful to have some spare capacity in the trouser department if you were desperate to take a shit whilst out and about.

Finally, any blog about fashion would not be complete without a comment about stiletto heels. At some point in history almost every fashion has been experimented with by both men and women – except stiletto heels. I would say men are not foolish enough to totter around on a heel that has a surface area half the size of a postage stamp, but if you take low gravity trousers into consideration men are more than willing to wear abominations in the name of fashion.

Stilettos are in fact a very practical solution to a modern-day problem. Ladies are, on average, shorter than men. They have difficulty reaching goods on the top shelf in most supermarkets. This is why a six inch pair of stilettos is an absolute must on any shopping trip, as admirably demonstrated by this young lady.

Alastair and Daisy