Why housework is always too much

Play with children. Even catching children for bedtime or for washing them can be good exercise.

Sleeplessness. A good time for breathing exercises . . . . by the time you have breathed deeply to a hundred or so . . .

Don't use electrical goods that do the job no better than you could get exercise. Buy the goods you really need to make life easier with the money you save.

Exercise inventions. Here's an opening for the local bicycle industry. An exercise bike could generate TV power for your home - pedal as you watch, or run a mulch-maker, or . .

One Englishman powers his television with an exercise bike - the children can watch as long as they keep pedalling.

Human energy could generate power for many household tasks, and charge batteries. Treadmills and all those machines to make you strong or powerful or fast, could all do something useful - turning a compost-cutter, helping to make waste-paper into recycled paper, grinding up stuff, and charging batteries.

Loneliness is a major reason why people do not like doing housework. Have a child or adult friend around, or listen to interesting talks on the radio, or even sometimes enjoy the quiet, to think and daydream.

Do men and women need the same sort of exercise?

For hundreds of thousands of years, men have been the exercise freaks, out hunting and fighting and digging and building, muscling their way around, puffing and panting and sprinting away. Today if modern man does not have regular vigorous exercise, his health deteriorates.

For hundreds of thousands of years, women have worked very hard but at a more regular pace. They have not needed large-muscle speed and power. And if they survived child-bearing and resulting disorders, they lived longer. Today perhaps modern women are still evolved to need that sort of exercise, which most women have had in housework and in the fields. Perhaps puffing and panting exercises are for male physiology, and may wear women out sooner. As, conceivably, the men's harder, faster life, may actually wear out the healthy male for a shorter life than the conservationist female. Like that famous jogger, they may 'die healthy'.

Formal exercise is unnatural. That is, formal exercise which is not contaminated by being useful in any way. I never do any formal exercises. (I'm heading for eighty-seven, and last tested bone density was better than usual for my age.)

Formal exercise can be a waste of fossil fuels as well as a waste of time when people substitute it for doing things for themselves.