Aiming for a Swayze six-pack (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Aiming for a Swayze six-pack

8:46am Friday 30th December 2011 in Dave Barnett By David Barnett

I’ve never been one for New Year Resolutions, preferring instead to make promises which I fail to keep all year round rather than saving them up for a specific point in the calendar.

I now, however, find myself setting – indeed, have set – myself a goal to be carried out throughout 2012. And the fact that no-one else believes I can do it is what actually spurs me on – which is a much stronger position to be in than setting myself a task which everyone expects me to fulfil and then failing spectacularly.

It is Boxing Day, and full of food and drink, we are flicking through the TV channels trying to avoid all the usual pap when we alight upon a showing of classic Eighties movie Dirty Dancing.

This, as everyone knows, is something of a girl film. A chick flick. It is also, as everyone knows, the sort of film which blokes have a sneaking admiration for, though they would never tell other blokes because what is there to like about it, really? Lots of dancing? A bit of romantic drama? Some more dancing? Still, we’ve all wanted, at some point, to say, “Nobody puts Baby in a corner” and whisk our loved ones away to a more exciting life.

I have perhaps had too many glasses of Baileys, but I am watching my wife watching Patrick Swayze with his tight black vest, and then I am looking down at my stollen-stuffed stomach hanging over the waistband of my jeans, when it happens.

“I could have a body like Patrick Swayze,” I say.

My wife looks at me as though I have just said I am going to build a ladder to the moon. I think about pretending I said something else, but she is already deciphering my mumbling and her eyes are widening, so I blurt it out again.

“I could have a body like Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing,” I clarify, just in case there’s any doubt.

There is much mirth. Thankfully, my wife doesn’t say that the only way I’d get Patrick Swayze’s body would be to exhume the late, lamented movie star who died from pancreatic cancer, because that would have been in uncharacteristic bad taste for her. And anyway, Swayze was cremated and his ashes scattered over his Texas farm.

Instead, she just laughs uproariously.

Therefore, I make my pledge: “I will have a body like Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing by Boxing Day 2012,” I say in no uncertain terms.

Which gives me, from right now, a whole 361 days (it’s a Leap Year next year) to attain the kind of physique which Swayze probably earned through daily graft in his own private gym.

That’s the last time I shall mention it. But when you read this column this time next year, expect to be stunned.