The Gym Project

L has a problem with her ankle again, so she turns down my offer of the gym and I go on my own. Well, just me and my Biobank activity monitor.

I wonder if it’s actually detecting anything as I set off on 15k on the gym bike. Perhaps I should be waving my arms around so that it doesn't think I'm sat at home watching TV.

To make matters worse the gym bike starts playing up. The distance readout seems to keep sticking as if I’m going nowhere. Then it suddenly starts roaring through them or perhaps I’m simply going downhill. Then it freezes totally. I get off and stand by the bike but the screen still says I’m doing 78 revolutions per minute. I think it’s time to do something else.

I do some leg weights, a few arm weights and a spot of rowing. This time thankfully without an Olympic rower beside me.

While in the gym I finish my latest audio book. The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion.

It’s about a chap who is certainly an autistic Asperger's type on some level and his quest for a life partner, namely the Wife Project.

It’s full of great characters. The man himself Don, a university lecturer who has a difficult time understanding and connecting with other people and dealing with social situations but has a superhuman capacity for memorising procedures, anything from dance moves to sexual positions all of which can be practised upon one of the university’s skeletons.

Then there’s his mate Gene, who has open relationship with his wife which allows him to pursue his own research project of sleeping with a woman from every country in the world.

The Wife Project involves a detailed questionnaire. It aim being to find the perfect woman by systematically eliminating non-suitable partners - the unpunctual, the overweight, the vegetarians, the smokers, the heavy drinkers etc. So Don rejects the advances of a French nymphomaniac on the grounds of her drinking and smoking. Gene though finds the Wife Project very helpful.

Enter Rosie, a PhD student come barmaid, who is late, drinks, smokes and fails on almost every score. She is also trying to find her biological father, which Don helps her with via some secretive DNA testing.

Don becomes intrigued by The Father Project, as he they call it, and then by Rosie herself.

It’s all very much typical romcom fodder except the author’s narration as Don is brilliantly deadpan, all the characters are eminently likeable and it’s also extremely funny. Loved it.

(Sunday 12^th January)