Just Jamie - life's trials and tribulations, with Jamie Diffley

I'M on a health kick at the moment, my learned friends, and I must say it's driving me mad.

I would say bananas but that just brings it all back and I'm trying to block it out.

It's not my idea of course - in my eyes I'm at my ideal fighting weight (ideal if I was fighting flabby bears) - but the Long Suffering Marjorie has practically forced me.

For some fanciful reason the LSM has got into her head that exercise is actually good for you.

She already has the Tai-bo video, which comes hot on the heels of great exercise titles such as Mad Lizzie's Workout and Laugh to Lose Weight with Jimmy Cricket (probably), and for Valentine's Day she made me buy her a step-aerobics video bringing double disappointment.

Firstly, it left me with a spare pair of size 9 football boots I had already bought her as a surprise, and secondly Steps weren't even in the video!

By some great coincidence the boots fit me so all is not lost.

Now she's into exercise bikes and at the weekend the LSM's dad, Joe the Joiner, gave us his - trying not to laugh as he handed it over - which is oh-so wittily called the Ped-Row.

Amazingly you can row and peddle at the same time and you never know when such a skill will come in handy.

Apart from not wanting to look deranged, peddling away and rocking back and forth, I just don't do exercise bikes. I really cannot see the point. If I was to lose weight with the aid of a bike I would at least like to pass a bit of scenery now and again and at the very least have the option to pull a wheelie.

Ped-Row hasn't even got any wheels which I could force the mudguard onto and make it sound like a motorbike.

What makes it worse is that the LSM insists in doing her every-other-nightly ritual in the front room. And The One Bedroomed Flat doesn't have any nooks or crannies where I can hide so as not to be made to feel guilty while I sit there watching Robot Wars and doing my utmost to ignore this bobbing, peddling figure in the corner of my eye.

(I look up now and again to check the LSM hasn't rowed when she should have peddled and smacked her nose on the handlebars. So far so good).

But what gets me is the food.

I'm sick of chicken and rice every night for tea and where once a dirty-great cake would have served as snack there are now only bananas.

It's like being a monkey in Tenko with the added torture of being forced to watch a peddling/rowing figure.

The LSM is right into it and she knows if I stray from my strictly enforced diet.

The first thing she does when I come home from work is to scan me for crumbs or specs of chocolate - basically anything non-banana like - and freaks out if she finds anything, which she invariably does.

She has an in-built detector that immediately alerts her to when I have strayed and nothing gets past old LSM.

I thought I had her recently when I took to brushing my teeth as soon as I got home but I was rumbled when she started going through the bristles, carbon-dating any rogue bits of chocolate in her home-made laboratory and producing damning evidence.

I need some kind of clever ruse because no 27-year-old (especially this one) can live on healthy food alone.

Any suggestions should be sent on a postcard.