The mere fact that I have booked myself into a Yoga for Beginners course for the following week is enough to make me feel like I am making an effort.

An effort to look after myself. An effort which is mature, and grown up, and metrosexual, and manly.

Yes! I think, as I bound down the street. Look at me! I am a new man! I am a new man who is unafraid of yoga!

It was all Colin's fault, dropping words like 'supple' and 'lithe' into casual conversation. Words he claimed to want to be able to use about himself. Words I hadn't been able to use about myself since I was fourteen and as slinky as a slinky.

Not that I ever walked around as a fourteen-year-old describing myself as supple and lithe or as slinky as a slinky. That would have been an odd thing for a child to do, and nothing more than an invitation to bullies. To be honest, I'd have bullied myself I'd done that, and then hand-delivered the invitations to bullies up and down the land straight after.

But now, as a thirty-one-year-old man who finally realises he is in the prime of life and that one day he won't be, I am willing to take the reins. To be the change I want to see in the world! To sit on a mat and bend my legs and breathe deeply and emerge supple and lithe and as slinky as a slinky.

But not until next Wednesday, because the teacher's on holiday in Corfu at the moment.

This, though, gives me time. Time to mentally prepare myself.

I ring Colin and tell him to meet me at the pub.

'What else can we do?' I ask him, excited, as he sits down. I am drinking a shandy. A shandy! This is all part of the New Me.

'What else what?' he says.

'What else can we do that will make us lithe and supple? You know ... like things that ladies do. Pilates. Or that one where you put hot rocks on your face.'

'How will that help us be supple and lithe?'

'I don't know! But it must help. That's why they do it! That's why ladies are all so supple and lithe!'

'I'm not sure I want to put hot rocks on my face.'

'Forget the rocks. We can do other things. We can do holistic things. We could chant, or eat incense! We could get personal trainers who'll turn up at our house and make us run around parks! We could get matching ones!'

'I suppose I wouldn't mind buying a nice moisturiser,' says Colin, considering my proposal. 'Or some new Lynx.'

I am encouraged. But concerned, too. It had been Colin who had raised our lack of suppleness as an issue.