It is a truth universally acknowledged that we millennials will never be able to afford a house of our own. Perhaps it is time to put to rest the thickening tirade of false accusations of laziness and underachieving and gaming and overprotection, in order to realise it is really because the price of one month’s gym membership is worth more than our entire street put together.
Since when did fitness become the business investment of a lifetime? When was the law passed that decreed all joggers must have £50 leggings in ubiquitous shades of “loaded” and “loathed”, and trainers to rival the cost of their car? Who decided that it was a shocking show of shameless immorality to get on a bike without donning a skin-tight pledge of allegiance to BT Home Hub? Accept the sad mortifying truth: you are not in the Tour de France.
Scrap the spandex.
Loose the lycra.
Toss out the tracksuit.
It is time sport became sport again: about the taking part (as gloriously cheesy as that sounds). The Olympic Games have become an appalling paragon of foul-play and corruption, a stage on which the global superpowers lock in a fierce battle to inject their contestants up to the eyeballs with enough steroids to kick start a dead horse back into action.
This has got to stop.
After all, the most famous football game of all time was not in the World Cup, nor was it sponsored by MacDonald’s; it was played to unite enemy forces for one match in the blistering cold of December 1914, a Christmas Day that would prove the untameable amnesty that solidarity and sport can spark, even in the most violent war of the 20th century. It should not take two millennia to realise that cooperation will always prove mightier than corruption.
So instead of spending your pension on a pair of running shoes purely in order to prove to Karen and Mike that you can “just do it” too; or wasting your children’s university fees on an indoor gym that you use once and then avoid at all costs in a desperate attempt to supress the trauma of the dreaded treadmill; just exercise like you did when you were young: with your friends, sweating deliriously and foaming at the mouth for the last 20 yards. Never forget that the excruciating embarrassment of exercising unites us all, reducing us to a partially animate thing that looks like it has potentially been resurrected from an ancient Egyptian burial tomb as we stagger the up the drive after a run.
Rather than kindly donating your life savings to the local gym for yet another month of:
- paying the membership;
-complaining about the membership;
-never using said membership;
give your children the opportunity of being the one and only millennial not living on their parents’ couch at 30, all in exchange for an annual member 0.3% off discount at Sports Direct.
