Happy New Year  -  Bonne Année 2021 - aw sanbé sanbé  -  Frohes neues Jahr  - Bloavez Mad! 

Would you believe that?  My New Year gift (actually Xmas) is a TREADMILL. In British and American history, the treadmill's miserable history illustrates the awfulness of English values.

In 1817, millwright/engineer William Cubitt saw prisoners sitting idle. Instead of training or useful work,  he invented the tread-mill to “reform offenders by teaching them habits of industry.” 19th-century penal treadmills were wide wheels fitted with steps. Prisoners sentenced to “hard labour” would climb the steps repeatedly, causing the entire wheel to rotate. The penal treadmill was “the perfect punishment” by Victorian standards: useless but exhausting task that fitted with Victorian ideals about atonement achieved through hard work. Merciless hard work. The "Workhouses" used them as well, creating "work" for the "idle poor" ..... never wondering whether the wealthy were responsible for their poverty, the misery of rickets, the brutality of child labor. Some treadmills were used to grind corn. Others were simply a waking, walking hell. I once tried it in a museum. It was horrible.

Oscar Wilde walked a treadmill in Pentonville Prison as part of his 1895 hard labour sentence and it almost killed him. He left prison in 1897 and died just two years later, aged 46. The Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline called them a “preventative punishment” .... the priggish rich thought that no-one who experienced the treadmill would ever want to commit another crime. If they did - like stealing a loaf of bread to feed starving infants - then they were transported to Georgia or to Australia.

The ghastly penal treadmills were abolished in Britain in 1902. 

 And now I have bought a treadmill.  I prefer to call it a "skiing machine" but "a rose by any other name doth smell as sweet" write Shakespeare.

My wife thinks walking a treadmill will "serve me right" .... and if I a am able to lose some of my 'Covid Bonus' of 10 pounds, then she will be proved correct!  My kilt will tell me, whenever I am able to dance. SO LET US PRAY: for dancing and for losing some of those pounds.