The exit from pandemic lockdown seems as long and complex as the lockdown was abrupt and simple. A few months of outdoor eating have turned into another few months of indoor seating but the masks remain. Anti-vaccine campaigners are as prolific as pandemic deniers and concerns about variants veer from the hysterical to the comforting.
The much bigger and more dramatic news is that I have turned from a leader in the Peloton resistance to a convert. I’ve always considered that ‘spinning’ was a traditional cottage industry best left to sheep farmers in the Orkney Islands and that ‘soul cycle’ was just a marketing effort to make spandex sound as cool as Marvin Gaye. Anyone who doubts this logic should consider the relative merits of The Spinners singing Dirty Old Town and Soul Man by the mighty Sam and Dave.
My world vision is of bikes on the open road if they have to exist at all but as a walker and car driver I have my doubts about the value of wheeled vehicles powered by somebody’s gluteus maximus, rectus femoris and gastrocnemius. Add in the red face, body squeezed into lycra and sense of entitlement to the road or pavement regardless of pedestrians and you have a recipe for confrontation. I understand the benefits to health and the environment but can’t work out why they spoil the good work by being so angry all the time.
Any prospect of sitting and sweating on a stationary bike alongside a dozen other humans puffing and panting with exertion was my idea of malebolge – the eighth circle of hell. This was the one where Dante suggested that fraudsters were sent and I can think of nothing more fraudulent than persuading people they enjoyed paying money to be tortured by some screaming sadist with calves made of wurtzite boron nitride.
But the Peloton arrived two months ago and has outperformed all expectations while being renamed the Pelican for no reason other than they look similar and it sounds funnier. From being considered an occasional alternative to running and rowing it has delivered a whole new physical, aural and visual experience. I’ve even found myself recommending its merits to other people which makes me sound like I have totally signed on to the cult.
The instructors are good and you get to pick someone who matches how you feel on the day whether that’s the brutal Olivia Amato and Kendall Toole or ex-Buddhist monk Sam Yo’s five minute warm ups. There’s a nice chirpy British feel to Leanne Hainsby and Ben Alldis and recent Reddit rankings show a lowest difficult ranking (7.34) for Portland’s Hannah Corbin. The Reddit list warns me off Christian Vande Velde because he is the toughest (8.67), an ex-professional cyclist who has finished fourth in the Tour de France and sounds scarily like a Bond villain with a plot to take over the world through spinning.
Speaking of Bond reminds me that another great US success, Amazon, has brought access to 007 with its purchase of MGM. My mind turned immediately to the prospect of home deliveries fulfilling the dream of the 1970s series of ‘all because the lady loves Milk Tray’ adverts. The prospect of Daniel Craig dropping a Prime delivery of household essential onto the porch while simultaneously disarming brutish henchmen of psychopathic criminal geniuses is surely the best thing that could happen to our lives.
But I also had a soft spot for the notion that Disney would take over the Bond franchise as was suggested by business talk a few years ago. It is no mistake that Bond’s double O number is seven because I have always suspected that Dopey was quietly spirited away one night and replaced by a deeply embedded British spy with a licence to kill. It is the only possible reason that he does not have a beard and never speaks – you heard it here first.
The American takeover of a symbol of Britain’s history is something that is doubly on my mind as I approach the fourth anniversary of living in the US. It’s also more than a year since I have travelled to the UK so the daily influence of the country has had no resistance for some time. A few signs of underlying change have become noticeable.
During a walk to Target last week I realized that American shop names now spring to mind before their UK equivalents. Home Depot comes before Homebase, Nordstrom before Marks and Spencer and Costco before any of the inferior UK warehouse shopping equivalents. When my ex-retailer mind has shifted to the wonders of the new world’s commerce it’s a moment to reflect on the changes that have crept up without me noticing.
I realised recently that I don’t really hear American accents any longer. Working in Belfast for nearly two years I was constantly aware of the accent and would occasionally have to ask people to slow down and speak up because an Englishman was in the room. But my ear has tuned to the tendency to pronounce ‘t’s’ as ‘d’s’ and the range of ‘have a nice days’ and ‘my pleasures’ that are everyday civilities.
The truth is that I can’t get Alexa to understand me unless I adopt some of the speech idiosyncrasies. I spent several weeks asking her to turn on the outside lights but my insistence on the using the fricative ‘t’ in patio simply caused the Bezos version of computer says no. Replacing it with a plosive ‘d’ makes me sound like a bad actor in Goodfellas but also has the desired effect of lighting the way.
I have moved into using sidewalk and garbage without wincing and have learnt not to say fortnight without hastily explaining that it comes from the Old English term ‘fēowertyne niht’ and means fourteen nights. No doubt I will slide into saying ‘y’all’ and thinking it is normal to take food home from a restaurant because the portions are too big. There is some way to go before then and it is possible that my return to the home country, vaccination passport or alternative willing, in Autumn (still can’t get used to saying Fall) this year will bring a pause in my Americanization. We shall see.
Image by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke from Pixabay