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Diary

Tony Parsons

Wednesday, 30th January 2008

Tony Parsons on keeping fit and being guarded by the Gurkhas

Fred is a boxer and so going to the gym no longer means sitting around watching Pimp My Ride on MTV. A boxer doesn’t exercise. He trains. The excess weight produced by your soft, affluent life just melts away in the presence of Fred. Every time he bawls in my face about how lucky I am to be training, I feel another couple of pounds drop away. I have lost a stone in the last year alone thanks to Fred, but now I have walked into the trap that ensnares so many middle-aged men — buying inappropriate trousers. My Diesel Viker jeans arrive in a plain brown envelope and I sneak upstairs to try them on. I know immediately that I will never wear them again — they are cut so low fore and aft that I would almost certainly be arrested for indecent exposure. Then my wife walks in on me. ‘Don’t tell me,’ says Yuriko. ‘Jeremy Clarkson, right?’ A cruel race, the Japanese.

Yamada-san’s Japanese class is packed every Wednesday. There are a few wizened old gits around my age, but mostly the class is made up of all these fresh-faced 20-somethings who dream of drawing manga comics in Tokyo, climbing Fuji-san and meeting girls. Incredibly, the students who are doing best are the ones who do not speak English as a first language but Hindi, Cantonese or Spanish. Wakarimasen, I keep thinking. I don’t understand.

The congratulations unexpectedly start pouring in. Have I won something? Ah, but no — it’s because last year the Press Complaints Commission received more complaints than at any time in its history, and the number was inflated by two pieces — Heat magazine’s sticker of Jordan’s child (143 complaints) and a piece I wrote in the Daily Mirror (headlined, ‘Oh, up yours, señor’) in which I criticised the Portuguese for their treatment of Kate and Gerry McCann (485 complaints). The piece appeared last autumn and we have only just reached a settlement with the PCC and the Portuguese ambassador. I was hugely impressed by the fairness and wisdom of the PCC, and I was hoping the controversy would be at an end. But now the broadsheets, as slow off the mark as always, have just discovered it. ‘Hilarious, darling,’ they all tell me. ‘Any chance of a quote?’ Will my shame never end?