Backwords: Keep Fit Fanatics
It's amazing what some folk will do to fight the flab, says Mike Shaw, then goes on to recall a fitness fanatic of long ago.
The perspiring, paunchy joggers stagger past my window in the evening sunshine.
Just down the road my middle-aged neighbour pedals like mad without moving an inch on his new-fangled exercise bike.
And my workmate at the office rubs his aching limbs as he explains the intricacies of his latest yoga position.
It�s amazing what some people will do to fight the flab.
But all this feverish activity is not new. It�s only a re-run of what was sweeping the country 50 years or more ago.
In those days PC didn�t just mean the local bobby. It stood for physical culture, otherwise known as body-building.
Colne Valley had its share of body builders. And one of the best muscle-men in the business was George Milligan of Slaithwaite.
The first time I saw George in the flesh he made my young eyes stand out like chapel hat-pegs.
On the stage of Slaithwaite Village Hall he made his muscles shake, rattle and roll until our gang in the audience were positively dizzy.
Many years later memories of that almost unbelievable display came flooding back as a bloke did exactly the same thing on TV to the strain of the Wheels cha-cha on Opportunity Knocks for weeks on end.
George never got on the telly. But he was still making his muscles twitch at a ripe old age. And he celebrated his 80th birthday - a few years before he died - with a weight-lifting exhibition that would have shamed men less than half his age.
His physical fitness wasn�t the only remarkable thing about George. As a young man he was a Left-wing radical and a Sinn Fein sympathiser.
But his anti-capitalist views apparently didn�t stop him starting up his own business building houses. And, lo and behold, it wasn�t all that long afterwards that George packed up working and went to live in the health-giving air of Blackpool.
It was probably his Irish streak that came out as a champion greyhound trainer. One of his dogs, called Well Schooled, broke nine track records and two world-best times. I wonder how much George took off the bookies for that little lot.
His daughter, Sabra, was the apple of his eye. She became even more famous as a physical culture exponent than her father, and it nearly broke his heart when she was tragically killed in a car crash.
Sabra won the Venus of the North title and came top in competitions overseas, as well as in this country, besides being a champion swimmer.
She also wrote several books, one of which George generously autographed and gave me many years ago. Re-reading it now - almost exactly half a century after it was written - it�s fascinating to see some of the things she had to say.
Such as her opening sentence: �Perhaps at the present period there is more interest taken in Physical Culture than ever before.��
And a little later on: �Yet notwithstanding all this, disease and illness are still prevalent. Men and women continue to suffer from such chronic ailments as consumption, fatty hearts, anaemia, constipation, obesity and so forth.��
Things don�t change much do they?
Time for my daily dozen, I do believe.
