No doubt, it would manifest itself on the screen of the scales. Happiness was deferred a little but within touching distance it seemed. It took a month to lose a handful of pounds and reach that milestone. I would aim to go to 15.5 stone to buy myself a cushion of security for the inevitable and much missed evenings-out-with-friends. I even started to imagine dipping below 15.10 stone (100 kilos). I was now used to the deprivations, such as they were. I still had a few more pounds to go to reach 15.10 stone (100 kilos). With a 6’8’’ frame, I was now officially slim. Indeed, I was back to 16.3 stone (103.5 kilos). From April to June, I was increasingly convinced that I would be beach ready for the summer. Suddenly, the former habits of the Olympian kicked in. The daily routine was set in my mind: early rise short jogs to start with two days fasting a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays). However, in the time it took me to walk from the bakery back home, I made a determination. The illusion that I still had a little bit of that swagger left was cruelly shattered. The Olympic Games, the World Championships, the Boat Races were an eternity away. There I was the old glory gone, if it was ever there.

To make matters worse, I caught a glimpse of a fat, middle aged man, looking tired and hungry in the reflection of his local bakery’s shop front. Worse, few knew where things would lead.Īs I wrote in time for Christmas last year, there were few good options. So large were the numbers across the land that the Human Resource departments of most companies could no longer muster that usual manufactured ounce of empathy. Millions, like me, found themselves on furlough. One year ago, the first Corona lockdown hit our shores.

Had they declared that every man, woman and child had the right “to happiness” rather than its pursuit, their declaration would have been dismissed as a Utopian document of little intrinsic value. “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. It is often said that the genius of America’s founding fathers was to have crystallised the essence of life on earth by defining three unalienable rights:

Pursuit of happiness genius