The Biggest Post I Will Probably Ever Write: A Really Long Essay On The Body

(And if you make it through to the end I will either give you a prize or run away in embarrassment)

Reading the Body and Soul supplement of The Times yesterday, I alighted upon two articles by John Naish (great health writer and from personal experience a ceaseless and energetic journalist who makes you feel like a wimp with his impressive workload) and the nutritionist Jane Clarke (look into her glistening eyes and I swear they hypnotise you into eating blueberries and other healthy knick-knacks).

Their dual purpose was to help schoolkids prepare in the best possible fashion for the coming exam season. Of course, I saw it differently. Exams do not matter. Quizzes matter. They really matter. The kids will be alright for they are the future. Us quizzers were the future and now need all the help we can get.

Thus, I have given some thought to adapting such techniques as "Stay Healthy" and "Psych Yourself Up" and dietary advice ("Hold the chocolate") to my own preparation for next week's Yorkshire GP and the coming world championship, because the truth is, sitting down in a room where silence reigns and people have gathered to write answers they either tear or ease from their memories to a number of questions in a set time period is an exam.

Yes, quizzers, or at least those who don't think the written form is an abomination, enjoy doing tests. We just call them quizzes, rather than competitive examinationing or something far less zesty. Cosmetic reasons, you see. And we enjoy doing them because it shows us how good we are in comparison to others and our past selves. The wonder of finding out how we do, the moment before we see our scores and everyone else's is one of those pure emotions that is impossible to replicate in other areas of my life.

It's not the kind of anticipation you get from wondering who is going to get whacked in an episode of The Sopranos or who will bite the dust on the next installment of Lost, possibly because you will have already looked up the plot synopses on the internet; I mean the unique anticipation you get from something that is actually happening to you. Then, in the aftermath, you want to do another quiz and do even better. But will you get better? Are you really at the peak of your performance and come to a place where your mental and physical faculties are in perfect alignment? Probably not.

It makes logical sense to follow such fitness, dietary and stress-management advice in order to get the best out of ourselves. The only difference between an exam and a quiz being that we wilfully trapise hundreds of miles across the country to do it and will do so for the forseeable future, whilst always having the option of getting completely rat-arsed at the same time.

For we are sado-masochists at heart, especially when we are tussling with our expectations (I see my own as a manic-depressive: high and cackling like a loon one minute, lower than Hades the next, someday I'll get it the medication it needs). The added frisson of competition and rivalry grows with time over a number of years, but you do grow to love that too.

This is some adults' idea of fun. Okay, it is my idea of fun and I know many who share it. Years from now, a few of us may be sitting in a circle faced by similarly dejected or dangerous looking individuals and when summoned to stand up will have to say: "I'm John W and I am a quizaholic" and tell the assembled wretches how doing well in The Eagle pub quiz one night led to serial tournament attendance and finally bankruptcy due to the phone bills caused by severe addiction to ITV Play 25 (I reckon there will at least be 3,000 phone-in quiz channels in 20 years time, so that ITV Play channel number may be a gross underestimate). That is the future. And it was all because he couldn't resist seeing a question without answering it.

We have long left behind the insidious beardy invigilators of the university exam room behind, only to embrace a slight variation on the form in our increasing maturity. There is a lesson in there about the joy of learning or autodidactism, but it is probably getting lost in the midst of my grammatical incoherency, but when you think about it, it is kinda doollaly with a liberal sprinkling of nuts on top.

Yet if you want to do better, and there cannot be a quizzer alive who does not want to improve themselves because of the unique and innate quality of combined curiosity and competitiveness they all share, you must change my lifestyle or introduce new habits and tricks to give ourselves a further advantage. If, for example, you enjoy anything fried with chips, like eggs, sausages or sliced hippo, you know you are feeding your brain crap that will sooner send it to the land of the dead than enable it to conjure up the year in which the Battle of Pavia took place. You reap the wind, you harvest a load of sluggish rubbish, if anything at all. It's the classic effiiciency equation. If I could remember what that was, though it feels right.

Of course, we hear stories about the caffeinising and oxygenating things quizzers do to get their brains acting in a more lively and productive fashion: the old instant coffee in the Coke can shortly before quiz time trick and the rapid chewing of gum before the Fifteen-to-One Grand Final shimmy, for instance (my reaction to the latter being: I wish I had some Airwaves right now). Not that anyone will admit to such adopting such measures, possibly because it is effort of a kind different to eating an encyclopedia (metaphorically speaking). It doesn't seem like the Corinthian thing to do. In fact, it's almost like taking drugs. Yuk.

I have to say that I take omega-3 and vitamin supplements because not only does it convince me that unified with that half-tub of Haagen-Dasz I have just slurped down, it will result in a balanced diet, but I have also probably been tricked into thinking my brain would expand beyond its already preternaturally large dimensions. I also eat salmon for the same reason, though its healthy properties may be slighly negated by the smotherings of mustard dill sauce, cream cheese and other soft and clumpy dairy products I cover it in. And tomorrow, I will probably read another health news article debunking the effectiveness of eating marine life and which instead says humans can eat grass after all with amazing mental-enhancing after effects. I will then be found on the nearest pristine lawn making like a moo-cow at dinnertime.

For a quick energy boost provided by the classic sugar rush, I have eaten chocolate bars whilst engaged in the act of writing down answers. They made me feel queasy so I didn't carry on with it. I have even bought by mail order a couple of bags of the herb lemon balm to shovel down because I had read in the "reputable" press (them again, tsk) that it improved the short-term memory. I firmly believed for as long as it took me to part with £20 at least, that excess herbage would yield certain success. I may also have been unemployed at the time, which explains a lot of things.

This led me to conduct a control experiment to go with it involving thousands of trivia questions, but such an exploration of the herb's properties was curtailed because it tasted only slightly less pungent than a gobful of pot pourri with a drier, cracked texture that felt like you were munching some spidery twigs. The scientist in me was defeated by the bloke who has to actually swallow down the stuff. My lemon balm consumption ended before I had made about a seventh of the way into the first huge bag. The bulging bags of shattered, arid leaves remain hidden somewhere behind the anchovy essence and cinnamon sticks in my darkest and deepest kitchen cabinet. You are welcome to the sacks of memory goodness if you ever happen to drop by my LA home.

Didn't Rilke Say Summat About Changing A Particular Thing?
So I'm thinking it has to be the lifestyle that provokes the change for the good and upturn in brain power. It's just a pity I may need psychiatric counselling in order to radically alter it and that I don't have an unforgiving but fair reality TV presenter to shame me into running up hills and eat more fibre. Also, I am confused enough by the recommendations of office workers taking an hour a day to exercise. Does walking to the newsagents every day count for any of that time? Not even five minutes? Or do I have to get into a pair of tracksuit bottoms and start huffing and puffing around the urban environs I call "the hood" for every one of the sixty minutes?

Don't get me started on the gym. Great idea. If nobody else came along. It's quite obvious that everybody else who goes to a gym will be fitter and stronger than you, as well as look like a potential cast member for a new series of Gladiators if such a TV show was happening tomorrow. Such bronzed and buffed specimens would make your squishy, blobby self feel so small in stature that you could take a bath in a thimble and leave ample room for Thumbelina to slip in.

Your friends who have got the identical gym membership will do the same, unfortunately not in your company, where a unified front could deflect the slings and arrows of inadequacy. Both of you will also wonder why they ponied up so much money for the next year when in reality the most exercise they will be doing is regularly diving in between closing London Underground tube doors or running like a maniac in the masses of people who are forever damned never to catch their chosen train.

Getting fit in solitude and the dark of the night away from invasive and analytical eyes seems to be the only way forward for me. Or I could always drive a cab, shave my hair into a perky little mohican and single out Ken Livingstone for an open air assassination with all the guns I spend my time stroking like Bond villain cats when they are not kept in the gleaming arsenal I keep concealed under my bed. Oh, and I would take all my first dates to one of the many Soho discount bookstore where we would choose from a range of special DVDs. La la... the movie-influenced daydreams seem to be taking over again.

But first you have to clear the obstacles and clean house before you make a fresh start. And I have absolutely no doubt that if I were to dump the cigarettes and the Coke and then went jogging into around the city free of substance addiction, then my quiz performances would improve, just by dint of my body working better without its little, ugly addictions and enabling me to have a clear head where the pleasure centres are caressed by exercise-catalysed endorphins.

It's getting rid of the things that is the heinously difficult part. Because they are not so much obstacles as life-support machines you have become dependent on over the last decade. Add to that the working up of the "botheration" and fostering of sheer willpower that was never there before. You can't even make a silk purse out of the sow's ear because there isn't any auricular material to begin working with. So it appears that you have to become a different person, who has to relinquish many of life's old corrosive delights, like the Domino's ritual I have recently instituted. It's very simple. This basically involves me feeling utterly ravenous and then thinking of hot, spitting cheese filling my mouth and ordering a medium Pepperoni Passion and wolfing it down before the heat vapours cease climbing upward in pleasing cloud-like flumes.

All that will have to go, he says with all the brittle conviction of monkey Dubya vowing to quell the Iraqi insurgeny for ever and for all time. Thank God, I hardly drink enough to warrant me worrying about the brain-rotting effects of alcohol. And yet... Extracting the nicotine (my word, I have a fag hanging from my mouth and I didn't even notice, and, amazing, as if by the hand of Paul Daniels, yet another dangles wedged loosely between my lips whilst I am revising this very passage ... c'est incroyable), the caffeine and the carb and fat overloads, I indulge in feels painful even when I haven't quit the bastards yet (excuse my language, but they take vast amounts of my money and make me feel worse, ergo: bastards, the lot of them, a very shower of illegitimate scoundrels). The prospect can almost be equated to my having live organ transplant without anaesthetic. All those things are still a part of me, like rum 'n' raisin ice cream with the raisins left in (yeucch ... I detest the wrinkly buggers).

I used to run, you know. I ran for miles around this seaside town. I did the Eastbourne Fun Run when I was 13. When you are 13-years-old ten miles seems like a horrendous cross country run quadrupled and strung out into a death-like ordeal. Your only compensation is the comforting tarmac of the road rather than the hilly bumps and their hidden deposits of massed rabbit droppings. I remember my legs having the consistency of jelly and my heart trying to emulate the BPM in Moby's Thousand. I may be exaggerating somewhat, however. The experience was made slightly better by beating my dad in a sprint finish. He had stayed behind to keep me company and I ended up opening a can of whoop-ass on him in the home strait. That learned him good and proper, hee hee, and just how sharper than a serpent's tooth is it to have a someone like me turning the last 200m into a silly test of who was paying more attention to the proximity of the finishing line? Razor sharp, I reckon.

Then something drastically went wrong. I stopped running and apparently started to watch more Sky television. I used to wonder why people had constant cravings for cancerous smoke and legal stimulants that make you tetchy and irritable, but that was before I realised the seductive allure of the short-term fix. That was before I had to get through eight-hour sandwich-making shifts at Butlins and watched dozens of people smoke as if it was their only ambition in life and they were achieving it three times every fifteen minute-break. And, still, I can faintly remember exactly a fit body imbues us all with: a sense of security and power. It gives us a further layer of protection against the elements and when you believe in such things your mind can make you feel even stronger

I can write that, and know that it sounds like a distant and empty echo of some fitness fanatic's motivational spiel. The truth is that it's as addicts across the stimulant spectrum, from alcohol to smack, live week to week, if not day to day. Next month is a century from now, next year a practical millennium. Time bends and recedes and takes on all shapes, but its rate of passage will always surprise us when we feel the consequences of time spent and wasted finally becomes apparent.

The long term is inconceivable, much like the age of 40 is to anyone in their 20s or under. The reality of consciousness is so overwhelming that the we cannot tolerate the thought of it ending, and when the quality inevitably declines and degrades we have the temerity to be shocked. An utterly human tendency. Living for the now is the most basic of all habits and is the one that informs everything we do. But, you know, you will get to that mortal finishing line one day in the race every one of us will complete sooner or later, why not make it better for yourself right now. Then I say, where's my red lighter gone; this butt is turning into mulchy cotton wool. This mother needs smoking and my nervous system nicotinising pronto.

But what I can't feel (I can certainly perceive them like some faraway halcyon dream happening to somebody else) is the pyschological weight or the claw of ill-health that is gripping me and which I really do know will be lifted and released once I get myself into a fitness regime. Regime is a bad word, admittedly. All those Maoist and Pol Pot connotations. It should be something like a fitness festival (no, that is absolute rubbish). And getting into one: sounds like I am trying to into the upper echeleons of a Communist party hierarchy or maybe The Garrick club. I hate militaristic comparisons, which could be anothe reason why I stopped calling non-quizzers, CIVILIANS.

That claw's hold is total but you learn to live with it by forgetting just how great it feels to have full lung capacity and a throat that is not coated in the kind of phlegm that glows in the dark. The smoker can make it go away just by refusing another cigarette. This is obvious. Other thoughts come into play and creep in like an overpowering noxious gas: but I am sure I can get away with one more cigarette in the short term. Oh, I will quit but what about another five hundred for all time's sake? It won't matter if I give up now rather than in a month's time, in the long term. I can get away with it for a little bit more. Such specious reasoning acts against itself. Your little time extensions escalate and the same things are said, and you are still a smoker. (Can you see that this is a kind of cathartic writing exercise in which I write myself out of smoking. Could work, I suppose)

At the moment, every time I come to the end of a 20-packet I feel it could be the moment for the clean-ish break. I have given up twice for 18 months since the age of 16, and man, did I make a song and dance about it, and man, did the people who I told I had quit give me lectures that were no doubt in the "cruel to be kind" vein, but which were, simply speaking, bloody annoying. Instead the health warning patter roused the defiant rebel in me. Though, admittedly, the instigator of this mini-revolt had the worst cause in the history of causes that included such nobel aims as universal suffrage and the abolition of slavery. Who cares about the fate of dissident writers stuck in prison for their beliefs, I'm gonna smoke more AND inhale even more deeply because it will show everyone I can head straight for my cemetery plot far faster before and not care one jot.

When my will was broken, smashed and obliterated, both times it took place at a party when my drunkenness had run over my willpower like a juggernaut would a badger (I'm thinking the insect analogy wouldn't survive the crevices offered by the tire tracks of such a mechanical beast), I could feel the smoke take hold in my chest like a long absent resident, sighing and putting its feet up in my lungs and feeding my brain with thoughts about how cool I looked with a Lucky Strike hanging from my lips. Other suggestions included you must have something to do with your hands and what are you going to do during the ten-minute wait for a train? Don't tell me you're going to read that ragged Homes & Property supplement? No, reach into the packet, apply the lighter flame, inhale and relax (always funny how fags are supposed to "relax" people when every smoker can plainly feel their heart is palpitating with rage and has suddenly decided it wants to burst out of your chest and run away).

Neither did it help watching, during the time of my first relapse at a sixth form party, Jean-Paul Belmondo chain cigarettes in Jean-Luc Godard films in a way that made him look like the coolest guy in film history. Never mind that he was playing characters who basically embraced their self-destruction while not giving even a hint of a toss. Giving a toss is for people who care. Belmondo was so past caring that if he saw a line of ducks crossing a road, he would just drive through them. AS IF THEY NEVER EXISTED. Caring would render him deaf to the bloodcurdling quacks of the squished duckies who had thought that their coordination and goshed darned sweetness was enough to make every Frenchman stop their car and look at them with a feeling stuck somewhere between overwhelming warmth and awe.

His bristling and anarchic attitude helped me adapt in a mere few seconds to that of filling out classic archetype they call The Smoker, the man who smokes with the fag hanging from the mouth and who exhales so very unexpectedly through the nostrils. I now was well-placed to ignore the "long-term" and smoke like a gun-toting Godardian anti-hero at least until Millennium Eve. Then I would reconsider. As for the here and then, if I was to smoke and therefore look cool, surely some accommodating female minds contained so serendipitously in the heads of some Anna Karina and Jean Seberg lookalikes would soon flock to me. Well, I knew the smoking makes me look cool bit made sense at the time and could be considered the re-tipping point. What it really made me look like was a bloody smoker. Smack my naive self on the forehead with a resounding "Duh!", but that's what the desire for cool leads you to. You know it is a senseless thing, yet you still pursuit with the odd visit to a trendy bar, a pricey t-shirt purchase or esoteric music purchase. Happiness and cool are not actually dependent on each other, although you are lulled into thinking that way at your stupidest moments.

You know it leads nowhere. The perennial problem with the notion of cool and the fads and images associated with it, is that it is so ephemeral and fleeting in nature and what could eventually become "so last year" at the drop of a hat is dependent on the absence of true logic. It's insane.

Take dead movie stars being caught in a defining image that acts like preserving amber for the multitude of posters printed for them today. Hero-worshippers prefer it that way. Especially when the likes of James Dean decide to turn their beloved Porsche Spyders into death cars and therefore ensure his fans won't be seeing him age disgracefully in the pages of celeb magazines. Death is the perfect ending that makes for fantastic cool; just look to one Shotgun-sucking Kurt. For Dean, death was the icing on the cake and ensured his permanence in the star firmament. He died young and stayed young. Because, let's be honest, the man in the street can barely name more than three films that the old time Hollywood stars featured in. Dean didn't have to do more than three films. He was set and he did just enough to make for a couple of decent quiz questions.

The pursuit of cool comes to nothing (I'm actually telling myself rather than you at this point). You'll end up like the protagonist in the song "Losing My Edge" and, hey man, that is so uncool. I'll stop using that particular four-letter word now.

But the problem with Belmondo's characters and all regal and elegant screen smokers is that celluloid ensures their eternal life. They are not real, but the viewer has to live life in all its terrible, constant 24/7 glory. Sometimes, we live with the consequences of how we react to what we see on screen: life imitating art in its most direct and dumbest way. He smokes, I like him = I smoke, people might like me. Looking back I could have just smoked for the duration of a film or as long as the actual character does and quit at the point of his death. I could have just left it in the cinema. That would make a lot more sense that copying the bad habits of some Godard cipher for the notion of proving that man cannot live within the bounds of Gaullist society and must choose nihilistic death, but not before taking some gamine lovely along for the mad ride. That's my one-minute reading of the sketchy plot and historical contextual details I can remember from A Bout de Souffle ... or was it Pierrot Le Fou?

Nowadays I don't think about smoking in those terms. I did get over it. I tend more towards the "Baby, I don't care" as embodied in Robert Mitchum's lackadaisical sucker in Build My Gallows High, because, if you think about it, not caring about anything frees you from everything, even though this includes the human race and even ourselves. It frees you to mess yourself up and smoke your lungs until they bloom with tumours.

Petty little addictions instill us with the careless attitude and cynicism that prevents us from taking full control of our destinies. Added up and they make for a mighty persuasive force. If they are removed we even glimpse an almost terrifying vision of emptiness. What am I going to do instead, you wonder? Pilates? Gosh, no. Instead we accept the steady accumulation of petty but ultimately telling crimes that we have inflicted on ourselves. We can even be defiant, because we are convinced it was our own choice. We wanted it this way. My way. It seems we are happy simply with the illusion of steering own path, despite it being a hackneyed and well-trodden one by millions of human beings before you. Everyone who makes a choice that seems capable of wrecking our emotional equilibrium and those of the people around us, wants to think they are some sort of pioneer, when the truth is they are a walking cliche.

I never used to be like this. The naivety was slowly but surely stripped away. I blame the 1990s. If you told me when I was 14-years-old that I would be like those smelly students who liked smoking one off in the showers and then soaking the place in so many varieties of Lynx deoderant that it made the place a potential inferno should they light up in the next ten minutes, I would have gone: "SHUT UP! You're a liar. Will I do that to myself for years on end?" Seeing the tears breaking from my eyes, I would nod my head and mention the coming demons of KFC variety meals and university binge-drinking and the resultant mini-paunch.

There are small mercies, even as I fetch my Marlboro Mediums from my bag. Since the health guilt often takes hold of me while I am in a supermarket, I am starting to enjoy having M&S's Classic Fruit Salads more often than not. I feel so much better eating one, slightly more alive, perhaps detoxed, for about ten minutes, which is when I remember it cost me £3.09. I had never believed fresh fruit to taste any good unless slavered in double cream and soft, brown sugar. Now I realise you have to go for variety and lots of it all the time. You just have to get used to it, and start to love and nurture the ever so slightly beatific sensation it temporarily imbues your body with.

The question is: will all this self-pitying soul-searching help me kick at least one of the demon tripartite habits? Maybe. I think in wistful ways of the wonder of running and sweating like a pig and feeling the warm sensation of accomplishment fill every cell in my body. Even if I painfully recall the groups of schoolkids who used to point at me when I was jogging and proceeded to make exaggerated donkey sounds in imitation of my desperate yet (it has to be said) athletic panting.

I will certainly feed myself better. Pork products are not conducive to optimum brain performance, even if the only time optimum brain performance can only be achieved if the said organ was removed from my head and put in a hydroponic-style jar where it wouldn't have to worry about the many nefarious ways the rest of the body was trying to sabotage it.

Neither is grilled cheese. Lovely, grilled cheese ... Ben Gunn knew what fed the heart and furred the arteries like a microscopic version of The Blob (1988 version). Then I have to consider my lust for mayonnaise, both plain and garlic. The Light version just ain't the same (just like Diet Coke is for people I can never ever understand) and it does provide fabulous chicken lubrication.

I have to face facts: if my body was a temple, then it probably looks like a succession of Roman, Visigothic and Vandal invaders have laid waste to it time and time again, with even worse waves of barbarians poised to come and do their filthy, wrecking worst, or best. And I let them all in. Opened the doors and let them have full use of the facilities. The temple is still standing, but the structural damage is starting to tell. One day, it will surely turn into the kind of ruins that tourists do not visit, because there just ain't that much to see.

At least on tournament days (here we go), I don't fill up on greasy muck in the morning, instead opting for fruit and some freshly squeezed juice or even (yes, sad to admit) a Slimfast shake, although it may be more to do with the old belief that a slightly empty and therefore hungry stomach helps you quiz better by improving your concentration. If I were to eat a balti before a tourney, well, the consequences are too dire to speak of.

There is also the belief that I don't want to make the first meal of the day an ordeal, as I do on normal days where I think about cooking something healthy but instead get a Tesco's ready meal spag bol and a grilled bacon sandwich AND some Dublin Mudslide Ben and Jerry's. Then again, I do get up in the afternoon, so maybe I feel guilty about not having that first important blah blah meal of the day. Cereal and toast are complete strangers to me. But then so, is working in a office (I used to do what? Get up at 9am and sit at a desk all day? You crazy.)

But, apart from eating a few unsalted cashew nuts, I have made one solid resolution for this week in the run up to the Normanton GP: more water. H20. The stuff of life. So I'm going to temporarily turn into a fish. According to Jane Clarke this is what it does (albeit in children, but considering my mental age, what the hey): "[Those] who drink plenty of water find it easier to concentrate, retain information, and do mental arithemetic, and also get fewer headaches". Perfect. I'm in. Now where's that length of hosepipe?

(I'm still smoking by the way. My middle and index fingers really need the company at the moment. However, I have learned something new and interesting in the very last hour. From reading my brother's copy of The Daily Sport, sometimes the esteemed publication calls female breasts "top bollocks". Journalism never ceases to amaze me. The DS hacks have to be geniuses to invent that kind of terminology. I salute them at the same time as wanting to wash my eyes out for reading it.)