Organising apps!

The other day I went for a walk with our daughter, her baby and her dog. As we set off she "told" her Apple watch that she was going for a walk. That way it would count how many steps she had taken, how far she had walked and how many calories she had burned. It was my third walk of the day and I had no idea how many steps I had taken, although I had a rough-ish idea of how far I had walked. As for how many calories I had burned, well, I gave up on the whole business of calorie counting (calories in or caries out, it makes no difference) long ago. In fact, I have pretty well decided that even stepping on the scales is rather useless. The best indicator of fitness or flabbiness is how comfortably you can fit into your clothes without having to buy new ones.

It's not that I object to exercise. I do a lot of it. It's the constant monitoring that gets my goat. This is especially so as there are plenty of people who believe that having a fitness app on their phone or iWatch or owning a Fitbit is enough to magically turn them into a toned and fit person. It's rather like paying for gym membership and never going.

 And now it seems that Apple have brought out something called Beddit: a sleep tracker! In fact Apple has not invented it, they have bought it from the Finnish company which has been selling it in Apple stores for a good while now. Here's a little description: "The £130 Beddit sleep tracker consists of a 1.5mm thick strip of sensors that are placed on top of the mattress and connected to a wall outlet for power. Combined with an Android or iPhone app, the Beddit 3 sleep sensor tracks sleep time and quality, heart rate, breathing rate and snoring. It also acts as an intelligent alarm clock that wakes you up in the lightest sleep phase."

I know sleep is important. My mother always used to say it was the hours of sleep before midnight that counted. This was a trick to get us to go to bed early. Did she not realise how long we then spent reading under the bedclothes?

Nowadays (nowanights?) I am an intermittently poor sleeper. I need to be warm but not too warm. I try not to drink coffee or tea too late in the day, just in case. And if the weather is damp, any bits of me that heve ever suffered from anything remotely like arthritis will decide to play up overnight. But I am not the only one to suffer this sort of thing: apparently 70 million adults are believed to have sleep or wakefulness disorders in the US alone.

Sleep deprivation is a basic torture technique. Donald Trump is reputed to sleep only four hours a night, as did Margaret Thatcher. This is not a torture technique inflicted on them, but seems to give them the energy, if not to actually torture, then at least to torment, the rest of us.

I read somewhere that one of the great classic beauties of the films of my youth, either Sofia Loren or Claudia Cardinale, is said to sleep eighteen hours a night (or should that be a day?), a sleep pattern that maintains her great beauty. I would imagine it is less painful that plastic surgery.

Pretty soon though, with all these fitness apps and sleep apps and calorie counting apps, there will be no need to make decisions about any aspect of our life; apps will tell you what to do and when to do it.

We need one in our house to enable the shower to adjust automatically to whoever is using it. This morning, after my run, I stepped into the shower, switched on the water and stood back to allow said water to reach a decent temperature. It did not take too long for me to realise that the water was not in fact warming up. Glancing at the settings, I saw that the dial was set to cold - not just moderately cold but snowflake-creating cold. And in order to change the setting I had to lean through the ice-cold waterfall, turn off the water, alter the setting and start afresh.

There is only one other person using the shower at present. He knows who he is.

If I were a vindictive person I would come up with a suitable revenge plan. As it is, public blog-shaming will have to suffice!