A distraction

MBH went to the gym today. It's a small gym, two doors down the road from our last house. Nothing special at all. In fact, the facilities are rather limited, it's rather shabby and sometimes in summer the air conditioning fails and the place turns into one big wet sauna.

The one thing that is special about it, however, is the members. You see, for some reason, the place is packed with celebs. And I am not talking Kerry Katona or other Z-listers. I am talking the real stuff.

So, in goes MBH and onto the cross-country machine to find out that right next to her is no other than Chris Martin. A rather innocuous name, I know. You must be thinking: "It rings a bell, remind me who he is?" Well, he is Coldplay! He sold almost 100,000,000 records. One of the biggest rock stars in the world. Second pretty much only to Bono. And, most importantly, he is Mr. Gwyneth Paltrow. No Z-lister then. Anyhow, Chrisy-boy goes on exercising for an hour and a half right next to MBH. Or as MBH said: "It was quite a distraction."

Now my first reaction was: "What? That sorry git? He is the least distracting person in the world! You are married to an Adonis [that's me] and you are getting distracted by this curly red-head geek who names his daughter after a computer company. Next thing you'd change our daughter's name to Dell!"

On second thought, I realised I am much better off accepting MBH's reaction for what it is. You see, only this morning I was reading an article in the paper about our innate mathematical intuitions and how dramatically different they are than our learned ones. The article was based on research of an Amazonian tribe - the Munduruku - that live in complete isolation. Riveting stuff indeed. And yet, I was suddenly distracted by a photo of someone called Jane Goldman. I had no idea who she was [Jonathan Ross's BH] or why the hell was her picture in the paper. And what was it that distracted me from the Munduruku? Nothing other than Ms Goldman's enormous puppies. And by puppies I mean bosom.

Now, obviously, anything that I do should be considered acceptable. By these standards, however, I guess I set the bar for acceptable distraction rather low. Way, way lower than spending an hour and a half in the gym next to one of the world's biggest rock stars.

Happy Pesach / Easter.

PS 270km down. 730km to go. Hoping to clock quite a few this long weekend.