I Have Muscles!

I’ve been going to Kieser for about three months now. Kieser is a gym of sorts, although it’s not filled with twenty-year-olds wearing crop tops and admiring themselves in mirrors. It is mostly filled with older people. Quite a lot of them look half dead.

I fit in beautifully.

We shuffle from one machine to another, carrying various injuries, replaced joints and body parts that have simply stopped cooperating. Knees don’t bend. Arms don’t lift. Backs complain. Legs drag behind like reluctant children. Nobody is trying to become an Instagram fitness influencer. Most of us would simply like to get out of a chair without making a noise.

The machines are very controlled. You sit down, adjust everything, push or pull something heavy and try not to look alarmed. Then you rest while pretending you’re not completely exhausted. Nobody leaps around shouting encouragement. There is no thumping music or Lycra parade. It is all terribly civilised.

When I started, several parts of my body seemed to be purely decorative. My legs had forgotten they were supposed to contain muscles, and my balance remained committed to keeping life interesting. I wasn’t expecting miracles. I thought perhaps I might become slightly less creaky.

But something rather shocking has happened.

I have muscles.

Actual muscles.

I noticed them in my legs first. There are definite shapes where previously there was just leg. When I tense them, things happen. Parts of my body that have been missing in action for years appear to have received the memo and reported back for duty.

I’m not about to enter a bodybuilding competition. Nobody will be rubbing oil on me and asking me to pose under bright lights. But after years of nerve damage, muscle wasting and bits of me refusing to move properly, seeing even a little muscle return feels enormous.

Kieser may look like a waiting room filled with people who have wandered in looking for the cardiologist, but it works. Quietly, slowly and without anybody yelling, “Feel the burn!”

At our age, we already feel the burn. We feel it getting out of bed.

Still, after three months, I’m stronger. I’m moving better. And underneath all the damage and disobedient body parts, apparently I still have muscles waiting to make a comeback.

Who knew?

The People Who Built AI Are Now Looking for the Off Switch

One of the co-founders of Anthropic, the company behind the AI system Claude, has suggested that powerful artificial intelligence may eventually need a compulsory “kill switch.” Not a polite little log out button. Not “Would you like to save your changes?” An actual emergency mechanism that can shut the whole thing down if AI becomes dangerous or starts behaving in ways nobody can control.

That is reassuring.

It is rather like the inventor of the chainsaw announcing, after selling several million of them, that perhaps everyone should also be issued with a very large sticking plaster.

The people developing AI have spent years telling us how magnificent it will be. It will cure diseases, solve climate change, write computer code, drive our cars, run businesses and possibly fold a fitted sheet. 

I'm a child of the 60's. Didn't these idiots every see 'The Terminator"? And it's believable. Oh not the going back from the future to try to fix things; but that AI will some day turn on us...

Now some of those people that wanted us to use it, are warning that it could become uncontrollable, improve itself beyond our understanding and pose a serious threat to humanity.

Suddenly, the sales presentation has taken a turn.

I use AI regularly. It helps me write, organise ideas, create pictures and answer questions I would otherwise spend three hours Googling before ending up watching a video about a woman renovating a caravan in Finland. I like AI. It saves me a fortune! Whereas once I believed the crappy add for sticking plasters that are going to fix my bent figures or my toe hump; now I ask AI (who 9 out of 10 times says it's crap).

I also like my toaster, and I would become suspicious if the toaster started rewriting its own software and locking me out of the kitchen.

The proposed switch would apparently need to be independently verified, which makes sense. We probably shouldn’t leave it entirely to the companies racing one another to build the most powerful AI on Earth. That would be like asking the greyhounds to supervise the rabbit.

Of course, creating a kill switch is the easy part. Deciding who gets to press it is another matter. Governments? Technology companies? The United Nations? Elon Musk after a difficult afternoon? And what happens if the AI has already read the instruction manual and quietly disconnected the button?

Perhaps we are worrying unnecessarily. AI may remain an extremely useful tool that helps humanity rather than destroys it. At present, its main crimes seem to be inventing references, giving people six fingers and confidently providing recipes containing ingredients that don’t exist.

Still, I’m in favour of the switch.

Make it enormous. Paint it bright red. Put it behind glass and write BREAK IN CASE THE COMPUTER DECIDES HUMANS ARE INEFFICIENT across the front.

And perhaps don’t connect it to Wi-Fi.

Harry - Bloody Hell. Leave Him Alone

Harry and Meghan have reportedly moved Archie and Lilibet to another school after only two days because their security team had concerns about the daily journey. Apparently, the traffic, distance and practicalities made it difficult to keep the children properly protected. Their spokesperson even made it clear that there was nothing wrong with the school itself—they loved it—but the children’s safety had to come first.

Naturally, this has become international news.

Two children changed schools. Their parents made a decision based on security advice. That should be the end of the story. But because the parents happen to be Harry and Meghan, every ordinary family decision must be examined like evidence from a particularly glamorous murder scene.

Harry cannot win.

If he brings his children to Britain, people ask why. If he keeps them in America, people say he is depriving them of their heritage. If he accepts protection, he is entitled. If he worries about protection, he is paranoid. If he speaks, he is attention-seeking. If he stays quiet, “royal experts” simply invent what he is thinking and publish it anyway.

And not a day goes by without another story about him. Harry visits somewhere. Harry looks tense. Harry looks too happy. Harry may have spoken to his father. Harry may not have spoken to his father. Harry and Meghan have changed schools. Harry probably sneezed somewhere last Thursday, and twelve commentators are currently analysing what it means for the monarchy.

Have we forgotten what happened to his mother?

Princess Diana was relentlessly pursued, photographed and hounded by the press. Harry was only twelve when she died. He then had to walk behind her coffin while the entire world watched. Whatever anyone thinks of the choices he has made since - and he has certainly made a few questionable ones - is it really so difficult to understand why he is protective of his wife and children?

He knows exactly what a ravenous press can do to a family.

Perhaps Harry and Meghan sometimes invite publicity. Most famous people do when it suits them. But appearing in public, releasing a television series or selling a jar of jam does not mean they surrender every boundary forever. It certainly doesn’t make their children public property.

Archie and Lilibet did not choose royal titles, famous parents or a battalion of photographers waiting to document their first day at school. They are children. They deserve to arrive at school worrying about lunchboxes and homework—not whether somebody with a telephoto lens is hiding behind a hedge.

Considering the press hounded Harry’s mother until the night she died; until the point that she died, you would think they might show him a little mercy.

But mercy doesn’t generate clicks, does it?

He Made It Big… Then His Marriage Didn’t

Alan Ritchson and his wife Catherine have announced they’re separating after 20 years of marriage. They met as teenagers, married in 2006 and raised three sons together. Then Alan became Reacher—a gigantic human action figure who solves problems by removing his shirt and punching people through walls.

And now the marriage is over.

There does seem to be a pattern in Hollywood. A couple struggles together for years, raises the children, survives the auditions, the rejections and probably some truly terrible low-budget films. Then one of them finally becomes famous—and suddenly they both need “room to grow into the people they are becoming.”

Apparently, the person you are becoming can no longer live with the person who helped you become it.

Of course, I’m in absolutely no position to judge. I’ve had three ex-husbands. I don’t have a relationship history; I have a trilogy. If anybody understands that sometimes love simply runs out of road, it’s me.

But it still seems such a pity. Twenty years is a long time. She was there before Reacher, before the fame and before millions of women began watching him throw criminals around while pretending to be interested in the plot.

Their statement was gracious, respectful and full of love for their boys—which is probably the best anyone can manage when a marriage ends. It’s sad, though. They made it through the difficult years, only to fall apart when life finally appeared to be giving them everything.

Still, I wish them both well. I’m certainly not throwing stones.

With three ex-husbands, I’m living in a glass housing estate.

Sandra Bullock’s Love Life Deserves a Refund

Sandra Bullock is beautiful, talented, funny, rich, successful and apparently cursed in the romantic department.

You would think being Sandra Bullock might protect you from life’s usual parade of disappointing men. Surely, once you’ve won an Oscar and become America’s sweetheart, the universe should stop sending you emotional potholes disguised as husbands.

But no. The universe gave her Jesse James.

Sandra married Jesse in 2005 and appeared genuinely besotted with him. Then, in 2010, shortly after she won the Oscar for The Blind Side, it emerged that he had been cheating on her.

Because apparently having Sandra Bullock waiting at home wasn’t enough. Perhaps he was holding out for the Queen of Sweden and a complimentary motorbike.

Jesse later admitted his infidelity, apologised and sought treatment for sex addiction. Sandra recently described that period as “really dark.” At the same time, she was secretly trying to protect her newly adopted baby, Louis, from the paparazzi. She once concealed him in a zipped hockey bag to get him safely past photographers.

Imagine winning an Oscar, discovering your husband is a prize-winning prick, becoming a new mother and smuggling your baby around like sporting equipment.

Jesse later said cheating was simply “part of life.” So is diarrhoea, Jesse, but nobody puts it in their wedding vows.

Sandra eventually escaped that wreckage and found love again with photographer Bryan Randall. By all accounts, he was kind, steady and devoted to Sandra and her children. He wasn’t collecting mistresses or turning her pain into a public circus. He simply loved her.

Naturally, because fate has all the subtlety of a brick through a window, Bryan was diagnosed with ALS.

They kept his illness private at his request, leaving Sandra to carry much of the grief quietly. Bryan died in 2023 at just 57 after a three-year battle with the disease.

She lost the good man after surviving the appalling one.

There is something particularly cruel about that. First, she gets the man who breaks her heart through selfishness. Then she finds the man who helps mend it, only to lose him through no fault of either of them. It’s the sort of storyline a film producer would reject for being excessively miserable.

And yet Sandra Bullock is still standing.

Her love life wasn’t horrible because she chose badly every time. She chose badly once. Most of us have done that, although thankfully ours didn’t usually make international headlines.

Then she chose well—and life was horrible anyway.

Jesse James was a prick.

Bryan Randall was a tragedy.

And Sandra Bullock deserved a much happier ending.  Just saying...