Healthy Living Financial Times Interview
Interview by Angus Watson in The Financial Times can also be seen here
Boris Johnson Politician
How do you exercise?
I run every weekday morning for 15-20 minutes, and I cycle everywhere.
Out of 10, how much do you enjoy exercising?
10 out of 10, I’m a glutton for exercise.
Do you look good when you exercise?
A little short of superb.
If you could change one thing about your appearance, what would it be?
I could lose a few stone.
What motivates you to be healthy?
It’s vitally important to go for a run first thing in the morning. Once through that barrier, nothing for the rest of the day is quite as bad, so you’ve played a brilliant psychological trick with yourself.
Any exercise tips?
As a cyclist in London, which is by far the safest place to cycle, keep space ahead of you.
Biggest sporting achievement?
Defeating the Oppidans 5-0 on St Andrew’s Day [while playing the Wall Game at Eton].
What’s the least fit you’ve ever been?
In my early 30s when I was about 18 stone.
What’s your guiltiest food pleasure?
I tend to eat the children’s previous night’s supper – spaghetti and meatballs – for breakfast. And I’m a cheeseaholic.
How do you deal with stress?
I don’t deal with stress. I love stress. I need as much stress as possible. Bring it on.
How do you relax?
Painting.
How do you keep colds at bay?
Oranges, spitting and press-ups.
Do you have a motto?
Vote Tory.
Boris Johnson is Conservative MP for Henley-on-Thames. His book ‘Have I got Views for You’ is published by HarperCollins, £7.99
Interview by Angus Watson, angusw01 [Email address: angusw01 #AT# btinternet.com - replace #AT# with @ ]
89 Comments
RAIN COASTER – Well our office certainly likes it.
JAQ- I have posted in yours .Its very interesting and again looks good I will read more later. ( and I have more to say on your unfair comments about men)
STEVEN L …aha ( I dread to think ..footage of a beheading mayhap lets open it up and see,……)
I am hoping for stark text to back up a theory I have.”Why do girls cover their excercise books with wall paper ?”
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STEVEN L – Its cricket. Well almost everyone I know never stops going on about cricket but its always been my least favourite game. Young Chisholm who sits next to me ( and does my bidding ). Is typical .See his effort in the smoking room mag.
http://www.smokeroommedia.co.
last post
http://wildmann.squarespace.com/anyone-fore-cricket/
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Newmania, your little friend is a traitor who recommends his readers back the aussies to win 5-0 this winter. Give him a clip around the ear from me.
You thought my blog would be all snuff movies? I’ve only ever seen one snuff movie, it links to an anti-Islam website raincoaster posted months back when we were talking religion. The internet and the picture was so bad you could hardly make out that the poor dears were being stoned.
I couldn’t be bothered with a politics blog, there are far too many around already. I’m not sure I can be bothered to continue blogging about cricket much longer to be honest.
It’s more fun writing stuff on other peoples’ blogs if you ask me, especially Boris’s and raincoaster’s.
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PaulD, please respect that it is extremely difficult to come up with a punchline to a comment about health and longevity.
OK Raincoaster, here goes…
A rich but ageing multi-millionaire turns up at a party with a beautiful twentysomething blonde on his arm.
Old friend takes him to one side. “How on earth did you pull a stunner like that, Bill?”
“I lied about my age”
“What, told her you were 40?”
“No, told her I was 95″
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IDLEX” I only want the strength enough to do what I usually do. What more does anyone need.”.. Monkish? (newmania)
Why? The same could be said by a professional wrestler.
Fame : Well known then.I know people who know who you are.
Really? How very strange! Has someone been reading this month’s Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, which features my idea of how to get into space using nothing but a very long piece of string? It’ll be 50 years before they ever try doing that.
Melissa knows who I am. I wouldn’t have got my various Boris books if she didn’t. But I’m sure she’s aware that I am not in the least bit famous – or even well known.
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… which features my idea of how to get into space using nothing but a very long piece of string? (Idlex)
So you found the pulley I attached to the moon, Idlex. Damn.
Doing cold turkey at the moment to beat the weed habit. It may not last.
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At school we smoked behind a bush that had long since died. (newmania)
Another victim of passive smoking? It’ll be the next warning on cigarette packets: SMOKING KILLS TREES.
I envy you meeting Melissa, though. I have formed the firm conviction that she is the spitting image of the Avengers’ Emma Peel. And I fear that after you have quoted Joan Armatrading to her, you will find yourself travelling at high speed through the nearest window.
And somebody please tell Boris to lay off the spaghetti and meatballs.
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And somebody please tell Boris to lay off the spaghetti and meatballs. (Idlex). (Why do I keep quoting you?)
Don’t worry, it’s a public school thing. We were usually so hungry that leftovers were a treat, something to be sneaked with great satisfaction. Rather like smoking behind the bush.
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Once again I find myself saying y’all have different metaphors over there.
PaulD, good one. You know Anna Nicole Smith?
idlex, think of it this way: your civilian, secret identity is well-hidden, but given that 10,000 people read this blog every day, I’d have to say that by now you’re, if not famous, then at least well-known.
Steven L: yes, give up cricket blogging. Blog about polocross. As far as I can tell there are no blogs dedicated to the sport of polocross, and it’s full of rich men who might give you jobs and their wives (see PaulD’s comment for background on that).
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You know Anna Nicole Smith?
Not personally but it rang a bell. According to Wikipedia, this Playmate of the Year married oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall, aged 89, when she was 26 while also being squeezed by various bodybuilders.
Can’t imagine much happening there.
And another…
Old boy goes to confession, admitting to the priest that he’s had a passionate affair with a 22-year-old nymphomaniac.
Priest: “As a good Catholic, how did you allow this to happen?”
“But I’m not a Catholic”
“So why are you telling me?”
“I’m telling everyone!”
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Yes, another good one.
The now-widowed (quel suprise) Anna Nicole Smith recently gave birth to a girl; the same day, her 20 year old son died in her hospital room, of a combination of prescription drugs and methadone. A week or so later she married her lawyer.
Yeah, so nothing much to report…
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but given that 10,000 people read this blog every day, I’d have to say that by now you’re, if not famous, then at least well-known. (raincoaster)
This is highly improbable.
I would think that most of those 10,000 come to read Boris’ latest pearls of wisdom, as set out on his website’s front page. And having feasted their eyes upon those lustrous pearls, and absorbed the Solomonic wisdom, and eaten of the sacred spaghetti and meatballs, they either move on to pastures new, or simply gaze in enlightened rapture into space.
The comments are anyway set apart, beneath the archived pearls. Only a tiny minority of the 10,000 will venture into the forbidding crypts of such archives, to drop a “Well Said” or an “Utter Tosh” votive offering into its wishing well, before hurriedly ascending to the light of the real world, before their guttering candles are extinguished.
I suspect that the denizens of these archives are simply those few chance visitors who ventured into those crypts, and tossed in some offering – and then lost their balance, and themselves plunged head first into the well. And they have never managed to climb out. They are, as someone put it some years ago, “monkish, possibly albino, bookworms, flitting about the corridors of a submarine Gothic Library,” – and lost in their own interminable, cryptic, and off-topic disputes. Did not Plato write of humanity as dwelling in a cave, and seeing their own shadows upon its walls – or something vaguely along those lines?
And if anyone in the upper world should ever speak of idlex, I am sure it is to say, with a sad shake of the head, “Poor bugger. He’s been lost down there for well over a year now.”
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Of course, Plato didn’t have pageviews to let him know his shadow was doing, fame-wise. Technorati such as Melissa will be able to inform you that pageviews (as opposed to hits) reflect people who’ve actually read comments as well as the post. Still what I’d call impressive.
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OK Raincoaster. One more on the confessional.
A tramp shuffles into church to escape the rain and settles down in the confession box, unaware that the priest is in residence.
After a couple of minutes the priest taps on the partition. Then taps again… and again.
“Stop that knocking, will you?” says the tramp. “There’s no paper in here either.”
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I’m very glad to hear these stories from over the pond, as I don’t think I’ve ever actually laid eyes on a confessional, except in Gabriel Byrne movies.
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“And then lost their balance and themselves plunged head first into the well. And they have never managed to climb out.”…
I think that about sums it up for me, famous Idlex .
This posting is the reason for your justifiable celebrity . Perhaps I should have some tee shirts done .. I am Idlex . ( and Stig why not ?)
Good gags Paul D. I smirked. This is a problem as I work in a no smirking office with a government hot- line to snitch on offenders.
I `m waiting for the invention of passive drinking . (See my blog for much more moaning of this sort.)
STEVE L . Your blog is excellent. Everyone here looked at it. Your predictions are entertainingly inaccurate in almost every detail.
CONFESSIONAL- Raincoaster as a transatlantic person wouldn’t you go to see your psychiatrist for your confessional needs .” Forgive me father for everyone except me has sinned and thereby causing me to behave rather anti socially ”
I think spiritual agony might be passed to the jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Police. I`m sure they would be able to extract confessions about things you didn’t even know you were guilty of . Whatever you do don’t confess to looking slightly foreign and having a duffle bag . For this crime the punishment is death by several bullets to the head .
Everything else you can do with impunity
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Oh, good lord. Shrinks are so retro! Nobody’s seen a psychiatrist for decades except as a condition of a restraining order. And as for spiritual agony, isn’t that a Catholic thing? Thank god I’m not Catholic.
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Aha a chance to correct than Idlex ; I leap like a starving raptor . Shadows in the Platonic cave are not of ourselves but of pure Platonic Forms. This philosophy works at a number of levels but it was ( in my view) at one level, a groping towards problems that have ultimately come to be seen as linguistic . Plato wondered how it was that we recognised so many various things as Tables and posited that was a pure form of table of which we see only a degraded shadow. The notion of the world being a shadow of pure forms clearly has mystical dimensions as well.
Platonic love, by the way, is not, just removing all the good bits It is also the conceit of immortal souls recognising their immortal other halves in their mortal and corporeal dressing. I use the word “conceit” advisedly as it was the Metaphysical poets who made much of the emotional truth of this ,”soul calling to soul”, before the object of desire was known. Donne and Marvell spring to mind.
I noticed this Romantic theme cropping up in the work of Noel Gallagher:
“You know I think I recognise your face though I`ve never seen you before ”
And “You and I are gonna` live forever”
In fact this fine poet is very much in an English tradition with his frequent reworking of the “gather ye rose buds “, carpe diem motif.
“you gotta make it `appen. You gotta we gotta …” and so on
The small part of Plato`s thinking dealing with love has rarely been far from the English romantic imagination and it was indeed just like that when I met my own “Soul-mate” Mrs. N . It was an ordinary evening in the smoky East India pub on Fenchurch Street. It was, in fact, some enchanted evening when, you may see a stranger, across a crowded room…. You may additionally buy that stranger a couple of drinks, have a quick fumble in the taxi and “Robert est votre oncle ”
FAVOURITE LYRICS
Oasis : My favourite lyric is rocking chair .” I `m older than I used to be. This town means no more to me . all my life I `ve tried to make a better day.
Another fave. Eddie and the Hot Rods ( Do anything you wanna do )
“You`ll get so lonely. Well maybe its better that way. But it aint you only . You`ve got something to say “….
Who would be a politician when you can be a Rock Star?
Anyone else got any favourite lyrics ?
.
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I know I shouldn’t be doing this but v.quickly then: Name that tune Newmania -
Standing on a golf course,
dressed in PVC,
I chanced upon a golf girl,
selling cups of tea,
she asked me did I want one,
asked me with a grin,
for thruppence you can buy one,
full right to the brim,
her name was Pat,
and we sat,
under a tree,
she kissed me,
we go for walks,
in fine weather,
all together,
on the golf course,
we go for walks.
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Wow Jaq, I totally didn’t know you were gay.
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..and charming!
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No, I knew that.
I’m going through an angry phase, so all my favorite lyrics are from Nine Inch Nails songs.
Or actually, there’s this one…you might enjoy it as well.
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JAQ isn’t gay .Her blog is one big girly flirt. (Very pleasant it is as well)Perhaps she’s bi. This reminds me that I need to book up tickets to Cabaret . Apparently “Two Ladies” is done with nothing left to the imagination.
“[GIRLS]
Beedle dee, dee dee dee,
[EMCEE]
Two ladies.
[GIRLS]
Beedle dee, dee dee dee,
[EMCEE]
Two ladies.
[GIRLS]
Beedle dee, dee dee dee,
[EMCEE]
And I’m the only man,
Ja! ”
Ja ! indeed ….
By the way rain coaster splendidly acid on the Anna Nicole Smith.
Beedle dee dee dee dee
I liked it .
( Can`t place the song JAQ)
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For three pence you can buy one
Full right to the brim
So of course I had to have one………
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Good gags Paul D. I smirked. This is a problem as I work in a no smirking office with a government hot-line to snitch on offenders.
Well thanks, Newmania. I did wonder whether the confessional gag might offend under religious hatred law, even though not a shred of hatred was involved.
Question: Would it be worse if the tramp was having his dump in a mosque?
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Newmania – “Her blog is one big girly flirt. (Very pleasant it is as well)Perhaps she’s bi. This reminds me that I need to book up tickets to Cabaret” ha!! cheek!
You think misogynistic behaviour, classic literature, EU membership, the 70′s revival, Matthew Parris and the Thatcher years, Terry Pratchett, the G8 Summit, Billy Bragg, Fathers for Justice and street art, Dylan Thomas, potty training, David Cameron, slavery and the sex trade, Jamie Oliver and nutrition, Childrens TV and contractual obligations, Mac, Dante and Virgil in Hell and Peter Hitchens are “one big girly flirt”??
Peter Hitchens and Mac are “one big girly flirt”?? well ok I’ll give you that one. Both complete tramps, God love ‘em.
Come back Mac!!!!!!!!!
pleeeeeease.
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It would for the tramp, he’d probably get lynched.
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newmania said:
FLO : Tell us more of your days as a poorly behaved schoolgirl. I have a scholarly interest…At school we smoked behind a bush that had long since died . There was nonethless a convention that we could not be seen by masters looking directly at us . It seemed to work.
Nothing to tell that isn’t implicit in my smoking on cross country runs story. I was a rebel, had – and still have – problems with authority in any shape or form. One other horrible memory is of the repeated clashes I had with my old maid of a headmistress:
‘Does your mother know you’re associating with that boy, Flo’?’
‘Oh, yes, Miss Bitter & Twisted, he comes to my house, she quite fancies him.’
‘Oh, really? How old is he? He’s not really a boy, is he, he’s a…a…a…(cough, cough) a…man, isn’t he?’
‘RATHER, Miss – and so sexy! But he’s only 2 years older than me, Miss……
Miss….are you alright? I thought you were going to faint for a moment there.
Then there was Mrs Cobweb-Drawers who taught DS. She called me Miss Peacock, so I called he bluetits. Two year battle of wills she and I had because I kept wearing non-uniform stuff.
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Guess what?!
I have met Newmania and had the greatest fun. He was on fine form at the Islington Conservatives event this evening and it was a laugh a minute. I won’t hear anything against him from now onwards…..
**waves to Newmania**
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This is not possible. As Idlex has surmised, Melissa is the ghost of Emma Peel. My own theory is along the same lines: She is Humph’s Samantha in a dual role or, at a stretch, Boris disguised as a woman. Please verify, Newmania.
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It was great fun . If I could convey to you the horror on the faces of the great and good when Boris came in and said ”
Where`s Newmania?
Oh joy . He does read and he does take note .He was able to quote JAQ, FLO, IDLEX , RAIN COASTER ,and many more . STEVEN L and PAUL D got a mention and so on . In fact he didn’t talk to anyone else. You would be amazed how intimately he knows everyone who posts regularly here .Most I don’t know, lots from the past few months . I was astonished. What fun it all was !!How thoughtful. He totally ignored all the creeps. Faith is restored, so impressive.,
(I am quite drunk)
BUT : Mel is a super fox and does actually look like Emma Peel. She really does.
Good old Boris .
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JAQ I am reading your stuff to make a more intelligent comment.
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Mel is a super fox and does actually look like Emma Peel. She really does.
I knew it! I knew it!
But if Boris has been reading the comments so avidly, he must feel the urge, every now and then, to actually post a comment or two himself.
Either something restrains him (bashfulness???), or he posts under a pseudonym.
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Melissa, I hope you had someone to drive you home. Those roofie cocktails are awfully strong.
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Newmania said – “Mel is a super fox”
I’ve been telling you all that for years! Now you think I’m bisexual?!! No, just not blind, yet.
I love men. The little dears.
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… oo what a hangover. Mel I have to say went home at a civilised hour. Myself and my chums went of to talk a little treason in a nearby Inn… oh dear.
I was able to tick Boris off ( in a cringing unctuous way of course) about his silly suggestion that Nukes are just the thing Iran needs . He claimed he got three quarters of the way through it and began to think the same thing but blundered on hoping for the best. I am the proud owner of a signed Biography containing a most gratifying note and in general am puffed up with an entirely false sense of my own importance.
A slightly embarrassing moment was when Jacqui Lait MP actually asked to be introduced to me ! . I had to ask here who she was . She is the shadow Minister for London so I really ought to know. She was conspiratorial about tactics to get rid of King Ken and seems a very good sort indeed .
END OF REPORT.
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Sorry to disappoint, Idlex, but Diana Rigg is coming up 70 and more Orange Peel than Emma Peel (oooh, bitch).
I prefer Samantha. She’s ageless. And smokes.
(Humph: “Samantha likes a ciggy but, of course, the studio is a no smoking zone. So during the break she pops out to enjoy hand-rolling a Cuban in the alleyway round the back”)
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Samantha Stevens from Bewitched?
Samantha Jones from Sex and the City?
Samantha Perrin, the transgenderiste?
Samantha Robichaud, world-renowned Maritime Fiddler?
Samantha Wolov, erotic photographer?
Samantha Bullingdon the fitness model and bodybuilder?
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Raincoaster – you are forgiven for not knowing this particular Samantha. She is the hostess on Sorry I haven’t a clue, the jewel in the comedic crown of Radio 4, the one good station remaining on the airwaves, if not the one good thing left in Britain.
It’s a panel game with no prizes, relying entirely on the wit of the panellists to deliver the funniest programe you have ever heard (apart, possibly, from Boris chairing Have I got news for you). Many’s the time I’ve had to stop the car to avoid ditching it through uncontrollable laughter.
The chairman, the lugubrious Humphrey Lyttelton, makes constant reference to The Lovely Samantha who is, we suspect, nothing more than a figment of the audience’s imagination. Rather like Melissa was until Newmania went and spoilt it!
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Well newmania is only an internet-based figment of Bill Gates’ imagination anyway, so that’s come full circle and is A-okay then.
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ps loved meeting JT too – ace (and a chum of newmania’s)
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PaulD & idlex
lol
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newmania, did you lock down Boris’ vote for Mayor of London? No good showing up for these things if you don’t get them to sign on the dotted line.
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The chairman, the lugubrious Humphrey Lyttelton, makes constant reference to The Lovely Samantha who is, we suspect, nothing more than a figment of the audience’s imagination. Rather like Melissa was until Newmania went and spoilt it! (PaulD)
He didn’t spoil it at all. He confirmed my prior convictions. And Emma Peel is, and always will be, the ageless star of the Avengers. Although I suspect that Melissa wears glasses, and spends most of her day sending text messages.
And anyway does this Samantha ever say anything on this radio show? It reminds me that I used once to listen to a late-night radio show featuring a Canadian DJ called Di Luke. She had a gorgeous Canadian purring bedroom voice (Americans mostly have harsh, screechy voices by comparison with Canadians), and I would listen not to the tedious music she played, but to her between-track commentary. One night she was running a phone-in quiz, and I got one answer right before anyone else, dialed the number, and found myself – Oh, Heaven – actually talking to her.
I have no idea what she looked like. She may as well have been wearing a burqa. It didn’t matter.
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Being Canadian, she was probably wearing a parka, not a burqa.
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And anyway does this Samantha ever say anything on this radio show?
Idlex, you astound me. This sounds like someone who has never heard the finest 30 minutes on the radio calendar… the one remaining reason I do not emigrate. I cannot believe it of you.
And no, she never speaks. That’s the whole point.
Humph: “Samantha has been helping the elderly archivist collect records from the higher shelves in the library. She climbs the ladder and passes the record down to him, whereupon he cleans the dust and wax off beneath her.”
(Probably wasted as we’ve all moved on to Elgar)
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I’m not a great radio listener, Paul. Listening to Di Luke was an enchanted aberration. As was listening to Radio 5 a few years ago. My greatest radio experience was, perhaps, to listen to Neil Armstrong step onto the surface of the Moon in 1969 or whenever.
I recently gave up reading the Independent, simply because it was no longer the balanced paper I knew when I first started reading it some 10 years ago, but is now dedicated, as someone said somewhere, to “misanthropes and cranks”. I should remark that I gave up reading the Times, the Guardian, and the Telegraph for much the same reasons.
I hate most television, except documentaries. It’s apparently all going to to go difital (I think I’ll leave that typo in) in the next few years. But I’m not sure I can really be bothered. I didn’t have a TV set when Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon, and I’m not sure why I need one now.
And over the last few days, all TV channels have been mounting an attack on women who wear burqas (or maybe parkas). And it’s an attack that is being mounted by our b*st*rd Prime Minister, no less. I profoundly hate every single day this man continues to be our Prime Minister.
I belong to the 60′s generation. I went through the whole darn thing, flower power shirts and all. And we were as demonised then as Muslims are now. Indeed, we still remain demonised, us ancient would-be hippies. But the latest new crime is not to smoke cannabis, but to smoke tobacco. I’ve seen it all before.
It’s just that Evil Eye…
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I gave up reading the Times, the Guardian, and the Telegraph for much the same reasons.
This is an outright lie.
I gave up reading the Times because their printers went on strike for a year. It used to have a great letters page, and Bernard Levin.
I next took up with the Guardian, and Jill Tweedie. I only gave up the Guardian when they started adding on supplement after another, to the point where it took a whole rain forest to print a single issue of the darn thing.
I started reading the Telegraph, rather against my will, because it happened to be the household newspaper. I was told that it had the best news sections of any paper, if it was a bit short on considered opinion. But when the Telegraph started printing obscure web pages as news, I stopped believing even in their vaunted news reporting integrity.
The Independent, as I knew it 10 years ago, was a sober newspaper. But in it’s current manifestation it has become degraded into a vehicle for a kind of cultural terrorism. Global Warming. Bird Flu’. Etc.
I’ve given up. I no longer read any newspaper at all.
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That’s nothing. Daily Kos did an analysis where they took the front page of CNN.com and stripped out the advertising, advertorials, “synergized marketing,” and meaningless feelgood non-news. They ended up with something like nine lines of text. Would dig out the link, but have been at a writer’s conference all day pimping the Shebeen Club and as perhaps you know, most of the action at a conference is in the bar. My research skillz r not @ their finest.
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All this excersise and you’re still a big wiggly lump of marshmallow.
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