Editor-At-Large: Forget fitness - gyms should offer free sex

As Britain's most famous lifestyle guru and personal trainer, Carole Caplin, undergoes an astonishing rebirth by accepting cash and a column from her main "Cheriegate" attackers, the Mail on Sunday, I have a prediction for the world of fitness. 2003 will be the year that trendy gyms

go the way fashionable restaurant chains did in 2002, and start to close. Over the past few years big mainstream companies such as Ladbrokes and Whitbread have bought into the fitness boom, resulting in thousands of outlets where you can sign up to lose flab and lower your blood pressure.

But now two of the largest independent operators, Holmes Place and Fitness First, are for sale after poor results. When it comes to eating out, customers have realised that for £30 a head, we want the personal touch, not snotty service by another resting actor at a chain such as Fish! with no individuality whatsoever. Now, with gyms on every street corner, who can be bothered to pay a huge joining fee to sit on an exercise bike when you can buy a video and do it at home, without having to look at a stranger's perspiring arse?

The days when a health club could charge £800 a year are over. In desperation, many have waived joining fees and tried to incorporate every passing fad from fencing to Tai Chi and yoga, but the fact remains that going to a gym is utterly passé. You can jog for nothing, or follow the example of Men Behaving Badly stars Neil Morrissey and Martin Clunes and pop an exercise video on for a laugh when you return from a night at the local. You, too, can writhe along to the music in the privacy of your own living room.

And who wants a personal trainer when they are so busy writing newspaper columns and planning their own videos and self-help books that they hardly have time to fit you in anyway? I met a man last week whose trainer also "did" Ralph Fiennes. All he did was complain that his trainer hardly ever had a "window" to fit him in. I imagine Cherie Blair is finding out that Carole's new masters at Associated Newspapers will leave very little time for Ms Caplin to come round to Downing Street and deal with Cherie's toxins, let alone meditation sessions down at Chequers.

Another reason why spending a lot of money on keeping fit is last year's fashion is that even tabloid newspaper editors are now doing it. They might deride Cherie's quest for fitness in print, but what they do outside the office is another matter. You wouldn't think that the readers of the Daily Star have much to do with the world of the personal trainer or food combining, would you? I imagine their idea of food combining is a Big Mac with fries or cod and chips. But the Star's editor, Peter Hill, is a man who has seen the future and it is full of hours spent crunching calories and swimming slowly.

Mr Hill recently had me spellbound with the details of his weekly fitness regime, which involves intensive tennis, doing something called "power swimming" with a special coach and working out at a gym with a personal trainer. I'll allow he was trim, and nauseatingly chipper as he has just been voted Editor of the Year – the Star's nipple count has been exceeded by a surge in sales. Nevertheless, there's something slightly repellent about a middle-aged man so single-mindedly trying to retain a six-pack. He is the male equivalent of one of the harpies from Footballers' Wives.

At the doctor's for a check- up, I discovered that my blood pressure was very high. I'd just spent two hours doing yoga. Perhaps it's time to forget deep breathing and posing on a pink plastic mat and take advantage of the free exercise opportunities presented by the Government's proposed Sex Offences Bill, which seems to make it legal to copulate in public places – providing no one can see. The new legislation will surely lead to a huge number of appeals clogging the courts as you can be prosecuted if it is deemed you were "reckless" in your choice of venue. Does this mean that gyms, faced with closure, can restyle their steam rooms and saunas as places we can go and have sex with total strangers, all perfectly legally? This could be the answer to their current woes.

Jamie for Paris

In Paris last weekend I dined with fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, a man who may be Peter Hill's role model, as he has lost about six stone in weight and looks gorgeously trim and lithe for his 60-plus years. Mr Lagerfeld did not eat as I munched my way through chicken and chips at the Brasserie Lipp, a Parisian landmark.

My food was dreary, but the company made up for that. The previous night at the fashionable Market restaurant, off the Champs-Elysées the food was mediocre and the service appalling. I've eaten a better shank of lamb at a pub in north London. Returning home I discovered perfect French brasserie food at Chez Max, in Knightsbridge. The room looked authentic, the waiters were charming and, even better, the food tasted better than anything I'd eaten in Paris. Perhaps Jamie Oliver needs to be exported so the French can be shown how to cook simply once more. But if Paris disappointed on the food front, walking the streets reminded me how terrific strolling about in London used to be before we sank to our current proud status as the filthiest city in western Europe.

I managed to walk around the Louvre, the Musée D'Orsay, to the Marais and up and down the Faubourg St Honoré, and only encounter three beggars in two days. I was accosted by no one with a clip- board and an aggressive manner trying to get me to sign up to Greenpeace or Oxfam, and no vendors trying to flog me the Big Issue every 100 yards. As the Parisian streets are washed daily I did not have to navigate around vomit, urine, beer cans and polystyrene fast-food cartons. I could simply put one foot in front of the other and fearlessly window- shop. Walking in a city centre was a pleasure, not an assault course.

* * *

Finally, shoe designer Manolo Blahnik's exhibition at the Design Museum is a triumph. Forget those tiny little pointy pumps all the Sex and the City girls witter on about, and see his early stuff from the 1970s and 1980. This guy has done everything you could ever have thought of – giant platform soles, lavishly fur-trimmed fetish boots and hilarious wedges. Manolo is a sculptor who just happens to work with feet. It's clear how many of his ideas have been blatantly pinched by big luxury brands such as Prada. Top designers increasingly seem to just spend their time remaking stuff from the ever-recent past.

Now even the current issue of Vogue acknowledges that. A few bold individuals such as Hedi Slimane at Christian Dior offer clothes that are dangerous and contemporary, but if you want to know what you'll be wearing this summer, invest in some 1980s back issues of Vogue.