The six most middle-class ways of exercising

Boot camp in the park
What could possibly be more middle-class than taking a communal area for the leisure of all and commandeering it for your personal use? And deliciously, everyone knows the man shouting orders at you is actually your employee and you could stop him any time you wanted.

Cycling
Practical, A-to-B cycling is for poor people. Instead, ride a £10,000 bike around country lanes in a large group, holding up traffic for miles until you reach a village tea shoppe where you loudly say you’d buy the local vicarage if it wasn’t for your ‘bloody commute’.

Wild swimming
Swimming pools, unless you own them, are municipal swamps thick with the detritus of pensioners and schoolchildren. Lakes and seas, by contrast, are pure, natural, and perfect for you and your clean-eating body which has regular glacier mud facials. Until you get Weil’s disease.

Underwater weightlifting
Weights are a bit ‘nightclub bouncer’. Aquafit is what your granny does on Wednesday morning. But lifting weights underwater is just idiotic enough to be plausible and none of your peer group will have done it first.

Going running with your kids
A 5k is passé, but a 5k with your adorable children Clarence (‘Claa’) and Mabel (‘Belly’) in tow, keeping pace beautifully with you and your sweat-free partner? Family time and fitness time all in one? You’ll be the envy of the course, and imagine that photo-finish.

Outdoor spin class
As pointless as purple carrots, as gratuitous as a Canada Goose coat, as wasteful as a Waitrose big shop. Be the first on your WhatsApp SchoolRunners! group to do it, or curse your missed chance forever.

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Thatcher statue to be fired safely into outer space

A STATUE of Margaret Thatcher is to be sent far beyond our solar system to protect it from vandalism.

The statue of the former prime minister, holding her signature handbag and laying waste to everything north of Finchley, was due to be erected in her hometown of Grantham after it was discovered everyone still hates her.

Scupltor Norman Steele said: “She’s reasonably popular in Grantham, just as the hometowns of serial killers still feel a shameful stirring of pride because they’re local lads.

“But it’s on a major train line, so visitors armed with hammers and chisels, crimson paint, and buckets of pig excrement would be flocking in. So we decided it would be safest in deep space.

“We’ll slingshot it around the moon, it’ll get another boost from Jupiter, and then this fine tribute to one of the 20th century’s most despised despots will be on its way to the Procyon system.

“Our other option was sealing it in lead and sinking it to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, seven miles deep. But there are microbial life forms down there. They probably hate her too.”

A spokesman for the Procyon system said: “We get your radio broadcasts, so we’ve heard of her. We’re going to build one five million times bigger and fire it back at you.”

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