MY morbid obesity is swelling and my spirits sink.
Went to a motivational speaker who exhorted me to "Think Big". I thus went supersize at McDonald's. My evening meal had to be taken to Herald Towers with the help of a team of Sherpas.
It seems dietary advice has come too late for me. The same could be said of the discovery of a comb down the back of the couch, smart sandshoes and a guided tour around the Olympic Park in London.
The last would have been most useful last summer when I wandered around this cement desert like a severely dehydrated Beau Geste. My mission was to visit one of the stadiums, watch a sport I did not understand and then witter on for about 1500 words. So far, so normal.
Unfortunately, the Olympic Park presented me with what the modern manager calls challenges. My experience was the very stuff of anxiety dreams.
There was the moment in the velodrome when I realised I could not receive a phone signal. This is routine. The first rule of media centres is that one cannot make a phone call from them.
Unabashed, I headed for the exit. Moments later I was very bashed. In some sort of unwitting tribute to Spinal Tap, I had wondered through subterranean corridors and came out basically somewhere near Luton. I could see the media centre in the same way that, on a very clear night, one can pick out the North Star.
The mass of spectators milling about the park were thus offered the chance to view an athlete of a certain age breaking the world record for inducing a heart attack, beating my personal best when I wandered up a pedestrian area in Vienna before realising, as I reached a sweeping corner, that it was a dual carriageway and the lights had changed.
Other venues posed specific problems. The stadium where the running and jumping about was taking place was as visible as a banker's avarice. One could see it from the Moon. Which is a sort of Croy with nightlife.
Unfortunately, my trudge towards the stadium was strange in that, no matter how far I walked, I always seemed about 200 yards from it, but at a different angle.
Strangely, I found the swimming pool regularly, sometimes even on competition days. I climbed the steps once inside and faced the water. No problem. The challenge arrived when I had to go to the mixed zone where the swimmers meet the press. On one occasion, I seemed to stumble into a changing-room; either that or I had walked so far I had stumbled into Soho.
The only day the Olympic Park made sense was when I walked around with Susan Egelstaff who does something that involves having a racket. But not in a Possil protection money sort of way. At least, I think. Anyway, Ms Egelstaff was an Olympian in badminton and had the proper, official Team GB shirt on. As we walked around the park, we were met by stares from the massive crowds. I occasionally screamed: "Stop staring at me. I am more than a sculpted body. I am not just a piece of meat. I have a brain."
This, though, did not deter fans who demanded we stop for photographs. The pose was struck, the cameras pointed. Then there was the shout: "Get out of the road, you baldy, big-nosed fatso." But I have learned to ignore Ms Egelstaff.
The highlight of the day, though, was that she managed to walk me around the park and then deliver me safely to the media centre. She skipped away to continue life as an Olympic athlete while I sat in one of the rows of media men and wept salt tears at having come safely home without having to ask a policeman on a horse and then be directed to the lost child unit. This only happened six times but it seemed more. And it had the advantage of me becoming reacquainted with the Noddy oeuvre.
However, the news there is an Olympic Park tour makes me want to go back to London and discover where I once was. It would be a sort of Hollywood remake, a veritable I Don't Know What I Did Last Summer.
Next year it will be the Commonwealth Games and the East End of Glasgow. It has been half a century since I was last lost in Shettleston. It gives me something to look forward to.
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