Someone once asked me to undress him using only my teeth.  While in principle this sounds like an interesting task, there is one thing that cannot be undone with the mouth alone, and that is the zipper of a man’s trousers.  You know how you have to hold them taut at the top when you unzip your own?  You can’t do that without hands.  It took about eight minutes just to get his trousers down and completely killed the mood.

The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, Belle De Jour

This is a problem that those who wear jogging bottoms will never face but one that they should.  Equipping the masses with pairs of trousers that have zips, buttons and belts instead of giving them customised hoodies should be our first line of defence in the battle against teenage pregnancy.*

You might be wondering why I have turned my mind to the breeding habits of chavs and here’s a clue.

If you move beyond the Vogue pose and the awesome t-shirt that Baines bought me (Staffs Uni designed this top for an eight-year-old but that’s alright because I have the upper body of a small child) you will notice that I am wearing a pair of Adidas trousers.

It’s okay I am not, as my sister put it, “chavving it up” I have merely taken up jogging with Gingell (if you’d read her blog post on Monday you would have known this, there’s still time to catch up before she finds out).

For the past two weeks Gingell and I have jogged 5km from our house, along the canal to the incinerator and back again.  As my housemate has already transcribed some of her thoughts about jogging to LiveJournal I think that I will share some of mine too (one of them being that zippers would definitely slow if not reduce chav spawning).

Thoughts about Jogging

It always amazes me the range of magazines that are out there, I know women that buy hair magazines before taking a trip to the salon.  Another niche market beyond my comprehension is that of running magazines.  Jim Fixx is a guy who wrote The Complete Book of Running in the seventies and Jim Fixx’s Second Book of Running in the eighties (because Complete must mean something different out in America).  Here’s what Bill Hicks had to say;

Remember Jim Fixx though?  That guy used to write books about jogging.  What do you jot down about jogging, you know? ‘Right foot, left foot… faster, faster mmm, go home, shower.’  OK.  Thanks, Jim, for putting that literary mind to the jogging issue.  But I know how to jog… being the biped that I am.

Love All the People, Bill Hicks

This was similar to my response when I first encountered a running magazine but there truly are developments; Gingell talks about different fabrics, she cites techniques, she has a pair of pimped out £10 socks.

When I was jogging along the towpath in the Stokie sunshine the voices of Bill Hicks and my father (“Exercise is bad for you”) were running through my head, so it’s understandable that a lot of what I thought was heavy on the cynicism.  I came up with a slogan for jogging (“Like walking… but shit”), I suggested less active sports (say extreme sleeping), I reasoned that anything that makes you forget how to breathe probably isn’t a good idea (shut up, that was a perfectly innocent thought until I typed it on the blog).

As with most of the things I mock, I secretly like jogging.  I am athletically inept and live a life that lacks a proper structure and a balanced diet, and yet, I seem to be able to do this jogging thing.

All this is rather convenient because the most recent challenge I’ve been set, by Gingell (who else), is to “Run at least one mile a week.”

Wish me luck as I go undercover as a healthy person who enjoys exercise.

*If you think that this episode of Jeremy Kyle has run for too long and you’re impatient for the paternity test, well, I’m not even sure I should tell you.  Read this article to discover another shining example of the law failing to keep pace with technology.