In the gym
You can count the number of times I’ve been in a gym on the fingers of one finger. Carpenter John had been feeling a bit of middle-aged spread (“I can’t understand it,” he complained, “All that sitting on my arse and drinking Guinness, I should be in peak condition”) so he’d decided to consider investigating the possibility of maybe joining a gym. Outside the Fitness-Something-Fitness place across from college there was a sandwich board advertising a half price deal, so I popped in to get a leaflet. Christ on a bike.
Everyone was orange; they all had a slightly glazed, evangelical We’re fit! look. Bangin’ house music filled the air, I grabbed a leaflet and legged it, and that’s my gym experience: Pumpa-Loompas and Ibiza Anthems ’96.
Of course, as a posh kid, I spent countless hours in the school gymnasium with my classmates, performing half-arsed vaults and tumbles in our scruffy white kit. We looked like the cast of the never-greenlit Leni Riefenstahl sequel Failure of the Will.
