Wow! It’s been exactly one year since I wrote one of these. Where does the time go? Or is it that time stays put and we move on?
The beauty of time and our relationship with it – whether it moves or we do – is that it’s cyclical. That’s what the Mayans believed and they were right about most things. Wait in the same place long enough and it’ll come round and pick you up, like a Circle Line train. Or fashion.
So Word of the Week has stood here for 365 days, glancing at its watch and doing the quick crossword, and now it’s time to pick it up, dress it in denim and whizz it round to Aldgate once again.
Has anything changed? Not really. Things have got worse, of course; things always get worse, don’t they, despite the constant quest for growth and progress. This time last year the headlines were about a fuel crisis. OK, we had a Queen and some bloke as PM and Russia was still more or less behaving itself and England looked like a good bet for the World Cup, but this year the headlines are still about a fuel crisis. Not just shortages at the pumps now but a comprehensive fuel crisis, whereby gathering winter fuel won’t just be a line from a carol.
Which has had us all thinking, I’m sure.
A couple of months ago my wife took delivery of a Peloton bike. This is essentially an exercise bike with the added facility of a video screen from which professional fitness instructors shout at you to give you the motivation you need to torture yourself. It’s really not a far cry from the original treadmill, which was invented by William Cubitt in the 1820s as a means for prisoners to turn the energy they expended in exercise into good, honest industrial production, eg the grinding of corn. They would stand in rows, endless climbing wooden steps, which were actually the paddles of a giant mill wheel, like a water wheel only with people instead of water. It was pretty inhumane really – deemed acceptable only by 19th century prisons and the modern fitness industry.
So anyway, I did a quick calculation and, without her knowing, I’ve made a few adjustments to the wiring so that every time she gets on the bike to exercise, our electricity meter takes a well earned rest.
I can’t believe Peloton and their cohorts haven’t pounced on this as a major selling point. More than 10 million people in the UK are members of a gym. That’s 15% of the population! If you added up all the energy expended by that lot riding exercise bikes or running machines or cross trainers or lifting weights every day, you’d have enough to heat thousands of homes (someone might need to check my figures). Plus, it would be a nice way for the young to give something back to the old.
“Where has this kind of thinking been for the last year?” I hear you cry. Don’t worry – there’s plenty more where that came from.
