I’ll be honest; we were quite drunk, but then that was the point.
The five of us had gathered to celebrate the life and times of our friend, Bill, who had taken his final bow and passed away the week before at the age of 57. No one saw it coming, least of all Bill, who seemed to be full of future projects (the biography, the beach cottage, the trip to Italy).
After a large and liquid Sunday lunch, followed by a sneaked smoke in the garden, Bill had stretched out on his bed for an afternoon snooze and that was it. A massive heart attack put an end to all his plans. ‘Good night and thank you for the show.’ Fifty-seven!
It was a blow made all the more painful as he was the third friend we were saying goodbye to in less than two years.
‘Hardly seems worth going home,’ muttered a morose Paul as we walked away from the church after a service that had little to do with the Bill we knew. He would have hated the whole thing: hymns sung out of tune and stuttering platitudes from mourners trying to capture a life in a sentence.
It all seemed a bit thin for Bill, who lived a large life filled with excess, so the five of us – Mick, Jerry, Paul, John and I, Tim, decided that a private, less sombre occasion was called for.
By general consensus the event was to be a boys-only lunch at Bill’s favourite eating spot where the menu was limited but the wine list extensive. In deference to Bill’s patronage, the owner offered us a private dining room with a view of the garden through a large picture window. ‘In here,’ Carlos said waving his arms around, ‘you can be private and make all the noise you want.’
Noise we made and celebrate we did, with countless toasts to, and stories about, our adventures with Bill that left us crying with laughter and sadness. Bill would have loved it.
As the wine flowed and the stories grew more improbable, we all felt incredibly connected to each other and to Bill. No one wanted the day to end. It was just one of those lunches that you will remember with joy ’til the day you die.
Mind you, at the rate we were dropping, that could be sooner rather than later.
By six-thirty, lunch was slowly morphing into dinner. Our waiter arrived with a round of hors d’oeuvres to keep us going and yet another bottle of red wine that would soon be lined up next to the eight others we had already sent the way of our pal.
The happy chatter of bottles one to four had given way to the introspection of bottles five and six, but it was bottles seven and eight that finally tipped the balance and poured us all into this depressing and mildly morbid cup. Deep sighs and half smiles answered a hand on the shoulder or a friendly punch to the gut, not that we had run out of conversation, but words for the moment had become superfluous. It’s a guy thing.
I looked around the table at these four guys I’d known half my life and wondered who would be the next one to punch his card and sing hallelujah no more?
‘Who will be next, eeny-meeny-miney-mo …’ As I said, mildly morbid and depressing because that thought forces you to reach out and touch your own mortality, especially when you know that your pals are looking at you and wondering the same thing.
For the first time in years I found that I was really looking at my pals and trying to fill up my memory banks with the joy of the day.
When you have friends of 30 years’ standing or more, you hardly notice them changing; it all happens too slowly. You see them as they are on the inside, as they have always been. You see the personality, the mind, the twinkle in the eye, you ignore the shell. But bottle by bottle our depth of perception changed, slowly pulling back and by number nine we had dulled the senses and washed away the twinkle. Suddenly the shell was in hard focus and all of us were forced to take a long hard look at reality.
Reality, as they say, is a bitch. We had become those lazy Old Farts we laughed at a short 15 years ago.
Fifteen years; it’s more than half your life when you’re 20, it’s forever. But when you’re 55 it’s house payments and school fees and a new car and it’s gone in a flash of busy making ends meet.
No time ago we had been jogging, gymming, flirting with the girls, playing sport and laughing at Old Farts who sat around drinking red wine, inspecting their navels and complaining about everything.
Suddenly, here we were sitting around drinking red wine, contemplating our navels and complaining about everything.
At 20, youth seems eternal, which is why guys in their twenties decide to have tattoos and piercings through their dicks and stuff that is cool if you are a rock star. They simply do not see that aged 50-something they are going to look like painted assholes whose dicks pee sideways … but I digress.
The reality was that we were all out of shape, some worse than others. ‘But no one quite as bad as Bill,’ we agreed in unison, like some aging opera chorus. Bill, who used to say, ‘Blinking is enough exercise for any man over the age of 50’ … a memory that made us laugh and feel better about ourselves, but I think that in our heart of labouring hearts we all knew we were only a sliver of bacon away from becoming Bill … Bill, whose idea of living on the edge was eating butter every day … Bill, who would never see 60.
***
I looked down at my straining belt and took a quick inventory.
I had been a gym addict from the age of 39, well, until a year or so ago. Gym had become a way of life that gave me the strength and fitness needed to perform on stage six nights a week. It was an ever-changing means to an end that moved through dozens of exercise programmes and diets over the years. Programmes designed to shock me into shape quickly and increase fitness, through to advanced programmes for the already-fit with regular, vigorous gym. Diets designed to lose fat, add muscle, make the body lean and mean, give you energy and cleanse the system. Diets that were very hard to stick to, but yielded quick results, and eating plans that were more a lifestyle than a diet. All were part of my inventory.
After years of trial and error, separating the fad from the factual, I finally worked out a series of programmes and diets that worked for me. Programmes from the quick and easy to get started, to programmes I used to build strength, maintain muscle and bone mass, as well as to increase fitness. All the stuff older guys need to avoid being laughed at and called lazy, Fat Old Farts (FOFs) by tattooed 20-somethings.
How determined I’d been to hold my own and not surrender to FOF-ness. So what the hell happened? How had FOF-ness crept up on me and my waistline crept out on me without me noticing? ‘Be honest now,’ I thought, topping up the red and popping yet another roll and butter in my mouth.
Taking inventory turned, as it so often does, to introspection and navel contemplation with red wine as a chaser. Why was this belt straining on the last notch?
I’d finally managed to give up smoking after 30 years of smelling like a used ashtray, much to my wife’s delight and thanks in no small part to incredible amounts of willpower (my wife’s), powerful nerve-calming narcotics backed up by copious amounts of sweets, and hours spent in the gym to work through the withdrawal symptoms.
‘See, it’s easy,’ said my wife.
All was going well until my left knee stopped working and surgery was needed to remove some torn meniscus that was jamming up the works, no doubt caused by all the jogging, gymming and flirting in my wasted youth.
‘You’ll be up and running in no time at all,’ said my suntanned surgeon, flashing his Rolex and his bleached white teeth, ‘I guarantee it.’
Bloody liar.
When, after several weeks of physiotherapy, I was still battling to exercise without pain, I made an appointment to see my surgeon, looking for a solution.
‘Take it easy and stop going to gym,’ was his learned opinion, ‘because that will stop the knee from hurting due to exercise,’ said the asshole handing me yet another bill and treating me to another look at his pearly whites. I swear I could hear ‘Jack the Knife’ playing in the background.
It was like the perfect storm. Suddenly I could not go to gym because of my knee, and I had a fabulous reason to eat whatever I needed to quell the withdrawal symptoms of cigarette deprivation.
‘Rather give up smoking and get a little porky if you have to,’ had been my other doctor’s comment on the matter. ‘You can always lose the weight later, believe me it will be easier than losing a lung.’
Put like that I could not agree more. As you can see, this doctor obviously went to a better medical school than my asshole surgeon.
The older you get, the quicker time passes and in the blink of recovery I had gone from fit to fat. In less than one year I had added 8 kg of fat to a body that was no longer able to walk up a flight of stairs without huffing and puffing like a 30-a-day man suffering from emphysema. I was now one of the Fat Old Farts I’d always feared, and so were my pals.
***
There comes a time to draw the line.
Banging my hand on the table to get their attention, I rose unsteadily to my feet and trying not to slur, I slurred, ‘I am sick and tired of going to my friends’ funerals,’ – the double ‘F’ almost defeated me – ‘especially when they are the same age as me. We are too young to die, it’s bloody depressing.’
John managed a ‘Hear, hear.’
Mick burped, ‘Bulawayo.’
Jerry nodded into his wine glass and muttered something that sounded very much like, ‘Rhubarb, rhubarb.’
I pressed on, ‘My point is, either you lot do something about getting into shape or you can have your funerals on you own and see yourselves off as far as I’m concerned. Okay?’
Closing one eye so as to focus on me, Paul said, ‘What’s the point, I mean look at us. We’re a bunch of Old Farts that passed their sell-by date years ago.’
‘Speak for yourself, Fatty, I’m in better shape than you are,’ said John.
Mick burped, ‘Whosanoldfart,’ which sent John into a fit of giggles, but it was Jerry’s reaction that amazed us all.
Quiet, calm Jerry started pounding the table, ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! I’m with you one hundred percent, Tim,’ he bellowed. ‘I’m sick of feeling like a Fat Old Fart. I am sick of feeling tired all the time and grunting when I stand up or sit down and I’m sick of having to walk outside and fart every ten minutes. I refuse to believe that there is nothing we can do about it. So what do you think we should do?’
‘I think you should take a walk outside,’ said Mick. ‘You’ve been sitting there for well over ten minutes now and I for one do not want to suffer the consequences.’
‘I’ll tell you what I’m going to do,’ I said, still slurring. ‘It’s going to take at least a week to get over the hangover from today.’
John managed another ‘Hear, hear.’ While he topped up the glasses.
‘But after that, I am going back to gym and I’m going to start eating healthily, because I’m buggered if you guys are going to come to my funeral before I have the chance of going to yours.’
‘Makes sense to me,’ said Mick.
Jerry’s ‘rhubarb’ evolved into something that sounded like, ‘Beetroot, beetroot,’ which I assumed was a comment on healthy eating.
‘Thank you, Mick,’ I said, not sure that Jerry’s contribution deserved any acknowledgment. ‘Now if you will excuse me, I have to go and throw up,’ which I did with much gusto and mostly into the toilet I’m proud to say. I then staggered back to the table in time to put in my dinner order.
I was met by a grinning group of friends who had come to the kind of decision you can only make when slightly drunk. I don’t know how long I’d been away. Time has no real meaning when you are staring into the business end of a toilet bowl, but by the time I got back my friends had created a new club, Club Fitness For Old Farts, whose initial membership was the five of us at the table, known as ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’.
I’m sure Tolkien was rolling in his grave as my man, Mick, felt the need to explain, ‘The ring, you get it. Do you get it? Ring … farts … you get it?’
‘I get it,’ I said. ‘I get it.’
‘Good,’ simpered Paul, ‘because you have been voted ‘ring master’ in charge of getting us into shape.’
‘What about John?’ I queried. ‘He used to run marathons and stuff.’
‘Yes, but my car crash put an end to all that years ago,’ he said with a smug smile, ‘and I know nothing about gym, so unless you can picture Mick running a marathon, you are it.’
Even drunk I could honestly not imagine Mick running a marathon. In fact I could not imagine Mick running at all.
It was over dinner that the details of our Fellowship were decided, while a rapidly sobering Jerry wrote it all down on a linen serviette with space left for our signatures. By dessert and coffee the whole thing was signed and settled.
What follows in this book are the programmes and diets followed by the Fellowship of the Ring, including comments and the occasional complaint from the Old Farts themselves. The Fellowship decided by a vote of four to one, that I should do an advanced fitness programme designed by top trainer, Clifford Meyerson, to set the benchmark. When I asked why, they said it was because we lived in a democracy. In my drunken state that sounded reasonable and I signed the serviette. That programme, too, is in the book.
Cliff works with some of the best surgeons and clinics in the country, where rehabilitating and helping patients reach a full recovery is a passion he combines with injury-free training programmes. His personal daily training programme is brutal, and this was the programme it was elected that I attempt. When I suggested that it was a little extreme, the reaction was as expected.
John said, ‘I’m so sorry, Tim. In fact, my soon-to-be-rapidly beating heart beats custard for you. What do you guys think?’
‘I think custard’s about right,’ said Jerry, ‘At least, according to my last cholesterol count.’
Mick farted and waved the signed serviette at me. ‘A deal’s a deal. Signed and sealed,’ he said.
That sent Jerry into a fit of giggles. ‘Hell, Mick,’ he stammered, ‘Old Fart is right, that one must have been brewing up there for years.’
Mick grinned, waved a finger at the waiter and said, ‘They don’t call me the Lord of the Ring for nothing. One more bottle of red if you please.’
And that was the end of the discussion. It made me realise two important things. Firstly, very few men ever really grow up, we just grow old … and secondly, it was going to take more than a week to recover.
Thanks for that guys.
For those of you who are inspired to try one of the Old Farts programmes and join our Fellowship of the Ring, each programme is laid out in a clear day-by-day format at the end of each section. I think you’ll find that one of the original fellowship members was in a similar condition to you and probably shared some of your concerns, but please remember it is always essential to check with your GP first before embarking on any programme. Medically speaking, we are all individuals and your doctor is the best person to know your limits.