Scrooge was right

Lawrence Toppman

Remember the exchange between Ebenezer Scrooge and the charitable chap who asked for a donation in "A Christmas Carol"?
"Are there no prisons?
"Plenty of prisons."
"And the union workhouses: Are they still in operation?"
"They are. Still, I wish I could say they were not."
"The treadmill and the Poor Law -- are they still in effect?"
"Both very busy, sir."
"Oh. I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course."

The key noun in that conversation is "treadmill," a noisy appliance for people too lazy to go to a gym, too misanthropic to exercise with others, too unwilling to walk their neighborhoods alone (and unable to get their spouse for company during the school year) and eager to cram in another 45 minutes of a movie while knocking off some calories.

That would be me. So I reacquainted myself with the whirring mechanism yesterday after an inexcusably long time away.

I told a friend I was going to start trudging back into the treadmill room (as my wife and I call it) on a regular basis on weekday mornings. He said George Orwell had considered "The Treadmill Room" for the name of the torture chamber where human individuality is wiped out in the novel "1984." I think he was kidding.