Tips to avoid nave knee and other apostolic ailments
Never mind the beach, the question is this: are you cathedral-body ready? Assuming that you will take some time off from the sunlounger to look around an ancient monument or church, you need to remember that this will involve a great deal of looking up to admire all those vaulted ceilings or paintings of heaven. You need to make sure your neck and shoulder muscles are toned and supple for this. Many shoulder injuries are caused by pointing carelessly at a cherub.
My DVD, Get the Abs for the Apse, demonstrates exercises to prepare you for craning at gargoyles and holding your camera phone above your head to capture the stained glass window. It will also help to get you crypt-ready, so you can manage steep spiral staircases without getting giddy and falling.
There are diet tips and several stepping exercises you can do to get fit in the section of my DVD called Tackling the Tower. Follow these and you will avoid the shame of being found collapsed and gasping next to an arrow slit one third of the way up, or suffering from battlements queasiness.
The Complete Renaissance Workout, prepares you for the gruelling visit to an art gallery. This concentrates on tautening those tummy muscles to help you bend to peer at the little label next to the Titian or the Raphael. It also shows you the correct way to nod gravely when the guide informs you about a painting.
Look out in a week’s time for my third DVD entitled Are You Terrace Bar-Body Ready? It shows you the correct way to catch the attention of the French waiter. He will ignore you if you gesture too forcefully. Learn the art of the pleading raised eyebrow – quite different from the impressed raised eyebrow you deploy when you are told that the reredos in the cathedral is believed to date back to the ninth century.
They probably don’t realise it at the Advertising Standards Authority, but while deploring gender stereotypes in TV advertising they are actually being highly stereotypical. Their language is dangerously machoaggressive – they speak of imposing “tougher” rules and they are even reported as promising a “crackdown”. This is what can happen when you have the word “authority” in your name; probably unconsciously, you adopt the language of the bossy tough guy, cracking down and hitting hard. I wonder if a typical Monday morningorning at the offices of the ASA goes like this:
“Morning, Geoff. How was your weekend?”
“A riot, Tom. I did a massive no-holds barred wash-up. The amazing thing is, after doing all those dishes, my hands are still very soft. It must be the detergent. How about you?”
“Got the garden under control. Stamped out all harmful weeds. By the way, can I borrow your stapler? Mine is deeply flawed. I got tough with it, but it is still underperforming, so I am going to have it totally eliminated. What are you doing today?”
“Taking a long hard look at the office health and safety regulations. We need to give them teeth and enforce them strictly with sanctions that really hurt staff who use the wrong fire exit. First, though, I’m going to take decisive steps towards the canteen. I could kill for a coffee.”
at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion
“Great idea, Tom. I could do serious long-term damage to a slice of fruit cake.”
The previously undisclosed meeting between Presidents Trump and Putin at the G20 summit was sa said by the White House press secret secretary to be “pleasantries and small talk”. I was puzzled, because this doesn’ doesn’t sound like Donald Trump’s style. F Fortunately my own source was able to clarify matters.
“Th “This small talk was definitely the smalle smallest talk in the history of civilisa civilisation,” I was told. “It was so tiny it was h huge. Even the Russian inter interpreter was amazed because he had never before in his whole life had to translate such trivialities. Alt Although he was the best Russian int interpreter in the world, the sm smallness of the US president’s talk com completely defeated his vocabulary. ““When it came to lack of sub substance, President Trump wiped the fl floor with Putin. He scaled new heigh heights of inanity, leaving his Russian count counterpart struggling for something more b boring to say about the weather.”