Diary – 2 February 2008

As publication of my new novel, My Favourite Wife, draws closer, Fred Kindall steps up the training. You need to be a fit man to publish a novel these days. ‘It’s good to be alive,’ Fred exults, as I lie on the floor of his gym and he bounces a black medicine ball on my abdominal muscles. ‘You’re so lucky to be training,’ he screams, his favourite catchphrase.

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.