Hands up who has some sort of exercise machine sitting unused somewhere in your house. Or shed.

Unused, I said. If you actually use yours regularly, you can put your hand down (and wander off now so that you don't make the rest of us feel inferior).

Yep, still quite a lot of us, isn't there? We could form a club. A ‘what on earth was I bloody thinking?' club.

Oh, we knew it wasn't a smart purchase. We'd possibly even made the same mistake before. But this time it'd be different. This machine would be the ants pants. (The ads said so!) This time we were serious.

Or desperate. And totally deluded.

The ‘air-walker' machine that still graces our (thankfully quite large) bedroom (artfully draped with various garments) was the one and only purchase I have ever made from those dreadful TV ads. The ones I usually snigger at and wonder who on earth would be so gullible as to buy from them.

My husband thought I was crazy. Quite possibly I was at the time. We'd just moved to a new town. He was working overseas for weeks at a time, and I was primary carer for a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old, with no extended family support for any sort of time out. I'd recently put on weight with a pregnancy that only went half term, and I was desperately looking for a way to exercise daily. Or, at least a way to look like I exercised daily.

We had always made joint decisions on any major purchases, but I'd just inherited $1000 from a grandparent, and, with no independently earnt income to call my own, I decided that I was entitled to spend at least some of this on whatever the hell I wanted.

Maybe my little act of rebellion was enacting out some perverse sort of punishment for him ‘deserting' me so frequently and for so long. Heck, I even argued that if he didn't go away all the time I'd even get up early so I could go out to walk for 45 minutes before he went to work, but when he was away, I couldn't. Poor me, etc, etc.

I knew that it wasn't a sensible purchase. We'd even made that mistake together once before - we'd bought a ‘stepper' and never used the damn thing. It made too much of a racket, and, by god, it was boring, so we got rid of it.

Would you believe, the ‘air walker' was the same. It made a racket. And it was ... boring!  (And it was even bigger).  Perhaps the only positive to come out of its purchase, back then, was that I regularly got up early on the days that my husband was home and took myself for a brisk walk up the beach, in some convoluted and guilty attempt to justify the purchase of this monstrosity.

Talking to others who have confessed to similar purchases, I see similar themes of self-delusion: ‘Of course I'll exercise in front of the TV,' and an irrational belief in the advertising: ‘They promised instant results... I went on it for 10 minutes, didn't lose any weight...'

And similar outcomes.

Did I ever fold mine up and roll it away under the bed like in the ads? Of course not.

‘Mine became a fabulous clothes rack, then got relegated to the shed and then went to a Rotary swapmeet,' confessed one friend. Hmmm, me too. Mine is still serving duty as a clothes rack. The only thing that is stopping me from dumping it is that it is two storeys up.

Once in a blue moon, when the Other Half has a grumble about it, I'll use it defiantly for... oh... about 5 minutes till I feel a bit... um... tired. Then I will half-heartedly propose a pact to exercise on it once a day, each time extending my time on it for, say, a minute. And to maybe find out if there is any way to oil it to stop the dreadful squeaking.

Of course I don't.

But maybe... just maybe... this time, now that I've got all guilty about it all over again... this time I will make a point of using it.

Do you think the time involved in moving all the clothes off it could be counted in the workout time?