Daughter 1 is on a health drive. Not borne out of any particular desire to have a New Years resolution, but merely based on the fact that she ate too many weetabix minis. She is trawling the Internet to find workouts and healthy recipes.
She is excited about a workout she has found and wants me to do it with her. The trainer is American and half naked, but we’re peering at her I phone and so all gratification is lost. He is unusually casual in his approach and misses out an exercise in round two, but it doesn’t seem to matter to him at all, he just carries on with his crazy assault of motivational crap. Keira, who is positioned behind him, is supposedly representing those who cannot quite cut it at the front with their t shirts off. Keira has stopped! He shouts, don’t worry if you have to stop! Then later on he exclaims: oh my god, even Keira is doing the full press ups now! Poor Keira, daughter 1 says and we spend the rest of the workout feeling sorry for Keira. By the end of the workout the trainer cannot control his excitement: you’ve completed the workout of professional athletes, he booms through the tiny speaker. Except for Keira, daughter one says, as she looks at me, sadly.
Daughter 2 isn’t impressed with daughter 1’s new exercise regime. You’re going to make yourself anorexic, she told her. Apparently, according to daughter 1, just bananas and oats mashed together and flattened into small pancakes on a piece of grease proof paper and cooked in the oven for ten minutes, are healthy. She has so far subjected us to two batches. Can’t you leave out the banana, daughter 4 asks her. I hate bananas. That would leave just oats, daughter 1 exclaims indignantly and they wouldn’t taste right! Daughter 2 is shaking her head, worried that we are all going to fade away.