ne of the challenges that this series of lockdowns presents is how to keep doing exercise. I have talked at length in this column about my battle with “staying” fit, but lockdowns have taken this to a whole new level: we are all moving a lot less and, in my case, eating a lot more. I bought a wholesale-size box of curry noodle packets that I have become addicted to; every time I remember I own them, I make myself some. They are super-low calorie, which means I don’t feel too guilty, ignoring the fact that even if they were 10 calories a packet, that’s no help if you eat 1,000 of them. My wife, however, managed to step up her level of activity during the second lockdown. She has been hitting our fancy exercise bike more than ever, turning up the difficulty settings, which means she is noisier than usual on it. I have often walked downstairs to hear her having what sounds like a series of incredible orgasms – certainly unlike anything I have ever heard before, even in our halcyon days. I had been seeing a personal trainer, which the last lockdown put paid to. But last week he got in touch to let me know that we are allowed to work out one-to-one, as long as we are in an open space and stay away from each other. I took him up on the offer, masking as well as I could my disappointment that government restrictions hadn’t made this impossible. And so it was that I found myself waiting for him in the park at 6.45am, wearing six layers of thermals that I knew I would regret as soon as I started moving. He arrived with weights, some weird bondage straps that he tied to a rail, and something called a Bulgarian bag, which I assume is so called because Bulgarians enjoy carrying things in the least convenient way possible. It was like a torture device. He then shouted at me as I attempted to get round a circuit of hideous exercises. There is something about going out early in the morning and training outdoors that makes you feel as if you’re doing a montage from a film, if that montage was a man failing to properly complete a circuit before collapsing on to the ground in the foetal position. I still haven’t managed to get over the embarrassment of being so physically inept in such a public setting. Even though it’s early, there are people on their morning walks who wander past and see me falling over because a simple lunge is too big a test of my coordination, or drop a bag and scream something very rude about Bulgarians. The kids have even picked up on what we’re doing. We turned the room with the exercise bike in it into a little gym space, and just the other day I walked past to see our eldest son doing a workout, completely unprompted (and, it turns out, unsupervised, which is probably dangerous). My wife did a kettlebell routine and our son copied her while holding a long-armed monkey toy. We filmed it so we can have a series of awkward exchanges where we show people the clip, and watch them pretend to find it as cute as we do, when in actual fact they find it utterly boring. Some people would see all this as progress on the journey to getting a body they are proud of, so they can feel attractive, or be fitter; so that they can play with their children and stay mobile long into later life. I see it as permission to eat more noodles.