That's Married Women For You

It’s early. We’re still in bed. L wants to run. Doggo looks shocked. I look shocked. I can see Doggo thinking ‘surely they’re going to get passionate first’ and really hoping that we do because then he can get another half an hour or so extra kip before facing the day. Nope. Sorry, not today. Into lyrca. Thirty minutes run round the park. Out of lyrca. Then we get passionate (at last).

Then bizarrely it's back in to lyrca and off to the gym. I do 2K on the treadmill, working up to a speed of 14.5kph, which seems pretty fast to me. I daren’t crank it up anymore in case I fall off. If I did at that speed I’m sure it could get messy. It would catapult me backwards across the room where I would collide with the girl on the exercise bike behind me. She looks like a soft landing but not an attractive one.

I follow my run with a 2K row. Last time I beat my target time of nine minutes, this time I go for eight and a half. I start off racing the ‘pace boat’ but it doesn’t put up much of a fight so I switch the display back to just raw numbers. I think perhaps I’m a tad over ambitious with my target this time and I time my effort all wrong. I end up trying to sprint the last 50m which doesn't seem to be possible in a boat. I come in at 8.30.3. A whopping three hundredths of a second outside my target. I'm distraught. Close but no cigar as they say.

I retreat to the pool to lick my wounds, where I do thirty-ish lengths. No psychos around today, in fact the pool seem to be full of ‘leisure’ swimmers. All the serious athletes must be out doing an event somewhere. Which begs the question, why aren't I?

There are two men in my lane but both do little more than stand at either end. Occasionally they swap ends but it takes them both an age to Doggie paddle to the other end. One of them annoyingly keeps stopping halfway to talk to the attendant and I have to swim round him.

When I get out I do see a more serious swimmer in the changing rooms. Well he’s got the full kit, you know lyrca shorts, ‘terminator’ goggles, two drinks bottles, assorted floats, paddles and other numerous aids which look sexual but probably aren't. Well I assume he’s taking that lot swimming. He should at least be able to shift the doggie paddlers.

A while ago I got one of those emails from L that started with the word ‘Darling’. Now whenever she starts an email with the ‘D’ word, she wants something. Well in this case, it was just a simple request. She wanted to know that if she hired ‘Anna Karenina’, you know by Tolstoy, would I watch it with her. Apparently it’s a fabulously mushy film set in old Russia. Well I’ve coped with Catherine Cookson so I figured it couldn’t be that difficult, and L has promised me that it doesn't have a happy ending, which sounds promising, so I agreed.

I was a little worried though when I looked it up on the internet and saw that Sean Bean was in it but L corrected me, it wasn't that version that she had ordered. The one she wanted to see had got Mark Strong in it, who apparently she fancies but, she says, only for a dinner date. Hmmm, we men all know how dinner dates are supposed to finish up.

This version is an adaptation that Channel 4 serialised into four parts. I wonder how long the episodes are? The film version was only 1 hour 40 in total. I could cope with that, no problem.

We watch the whole of episode one and it does start promisingly with a fairly gory train accident. I'm not sure about fabulously mushy, there's hardly any fluffy stuff so far. In fact, quite the opposite, Anna is hot to trot and doesn't wait around to be romanced. She is very quickly throwing herself into a bit of hard and fast with her Russian soldier, Alexey Vronsky, but that's married women for you.

I take L to bed with every intention of re-enacting the best bits of episode one.