Pump It Up

I am wondering if I am perhaps a bit out on a limb on this whole Nordic walking malarkey. I say this as there does appear to be a certain recognition as to its beneficial effects, notwithstanding the fact that one can look a total pillock. Anyway, this all cropped up over a coffee with Grizz who many of you will know, or may also know as Minty - to give him his stage name. I am, by the way, one of the few who knows his actual name, so maybe I should do a bit of a quiz here - what is Grizz's real name? But this is not the point. What is, is that he has also had a bit of a ticker issue, and that the doc has suggested Nordic walking, to which I said, well possibly, but it's got to be done with a bit of humpty - arms moving and pumping and that sort of thing, otherwise there is no point. You may as well, well, walk, if you're not going to be using the arms in quasi-running fashion. As I have mentioned previously, this appears to have been overlooked by many of the Germans who I hear, like a blind man with a stick, tapping the pavements of Playa de Muro.

Then later on my mobile went off and it was a chap who I didn't know and was one of those infuriating Germans who speaks English almost perfectly, and he wanted to talk to me about a place he's planning on opening in Cala San Vicente. This would be an activities centre, featuring - you've guessed it - Nordic walking. At this stage, I'll be honest, I was suspecting a Nordic conspiracy of some sort or that I had been singled out by the God of Nordic walking for having blasphemed against his - or maybe her - sport. The thing was that prior to the Grizz coffee, I had been with Alcúdia's tourist office types and had mentioned this water-sports centre thing, and damn me if they didn't bring up the Nordic walking as well. When you're talking about water sports; even then it's time to talk about Nordic walking.

I'm not yet prepared to admit that Nordic walking is not ridiculous, but I am slowly starting to feel as if I may have to change my opinion - a little bit, maybe, and then perhaps even, God forbid, have a go. But I can assure you that were I to, I would be in the depths of the forest on one of those routes that the Germans say you can't find, so that no-one, and I mean no-one, can see me.


It's Grizz Day today on the blog as he told me, over that same coffee, that the butane gas bottles - those that can leave rust marks as I mentioned yesterday - are to be phased out and to be replaced with plastic bottles. Anyone who has lifted one of these things will be extremely grateful for this news; the plastic alternatives are significantly lighter, I'm told. You can see an example at a Repsol petrol station.

It occurs to me, given that lugging one of these damned bottles can cause heart attacks, hernias, lower-back pain, ligament damage, that were this not Spain but the UK, might they have done something about the metal bottles much earlier. With all that harm that can be caused, there would have been endless compensation claims in the UK.


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - U2 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUfY5pacs5Q). Today's title - and the one I'm looking for is the punkish one.

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