and we cry when they all die blonde.....

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;"

Ah, probably the most famous Shakespearean soliloquy to be delivered by a man whose very name was a toilet joke. What Shakespeare doesn't go on to say in that speech is that, not only are men and women merely actors, but that in our own heads, we're all playing Hamlet: we're the stars of our own dramas and everyone else in our lives are merely the supporting cast. If you're the star, then the absolute most that everyone else can hope for is that they might get to play Gertrude, Horatio, Ophelia or even Claudius in the drama of your life. More likely though, most people will end up playing the third spear carrier on the left. We Hamlets define the world by how it impacts on us, and not the other way around. When something happens, or when someone does something, we will immediately view it through the lens of how it affects us. Somewhat annoyingly for us Hamlets, then, the supporting players in all our lives are often played by terrible hams; the kind of actors who take it upon themselves to try and steal some of our limelight and to attract attention away from us, the stars of our own productions. It almost as though they thought this play was about them.

Surely this Hamlet complex is the only way to explain why so many people seem to be so wrapped up in themselves and their own lives and so insensitive to the needs of others. I'm sure we all see countless examples every day of our lives: the people who jump the traffic lights, as though red lights somehow don't apply for them and that it's okay for you to have to wait at a green light until they have gone through; the guy in the pool who ploughs up and down the lane you're sharing at a speed of his choosing, showing no consideration at all to your needs or the speed at which you're swimming, wrapped up only in his own requirements; the people you work with who will happily take credit but are quick to duck responsibility and to apportion blame; the guy who elbows his way to the front of the bar queue and gleefully gets served in front of you.... life sometimes seems to be a succession of little acts of rudeness; death from the thousand cuts of someone else's lack of consideration for another human being, or at least by their decision that their own needs are more important. Well, when you're the star of the show, it's you who should be getting the plaudits. Why worry about the little people?

Only life isn't really like that, is it? As Shakespeare goes on to say in the same soliloquy:

"And one man in his time plays many parts,"

He's referring, of course, to the seven ages of man; our journey from "mewling and puking" infant to decrepit old age, "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything". What he might also add is that, whilst we might all be playing Hamlet in the dramas of our own lives, we're also simultaneously playing all of the other parts in other people's dramas. You might be Polonious to your brother, Rosencrantz to your boss and the third spear carrier on the left to your neighbours....Everyone might be Hamlet in their own head, but we'd do well to remember that we're no more than a supporting character in everyone else's. To mix my metaphors, wouldn't we do better to think of life as a team game? No matter how good a Ronaldo or a Kaká might be, no matter how inspirational their individual brilliance on the football pitch might be, they still can't win a game of football entirely on their own. Even people in the apparently individual pursuits like tennis or golf will still rely heavily on their own support teams if they are to succeed; their coaches and their caddies, their physiotherapists and their psychotherapists.... even their families and friends.

As a contemporary of Shakespeare, John Donne, wrote:

"No man is an island, entire of itself
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
As well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
It tolls for thee."

I like the idea that we're all connected simply by being human. We're all in it together, aren't we? Anything we can do to help make all of our rides a little easier have got to be worthwhile, hasn't it? Isn't that a much nicer way to think about the world and the way we relate to each other? We're all ultimately in the same show and not just the stars of our own matinees. Wouldn't it be nice if we all tried to behave a bit more like it?

Of course, the somewhat inconvenient problem with this argument is that I'm not so selfless myself as to be beyond reproach. By railing against traffic light jumpers, swimming pool hogs, unscrupulous colleagues, queue jumpers at the bar and the like, I'm merely casting my own judgement upon them all; a judgement based entirely upon how the behaviour of those people has impacted upon me and how it has inconvenienced me. By acknowledging that fact, am I not also acknowledging that I am guilty of casting myself as Hamlet?

As Shakespeare also said:

"A pox damn you, you muddy rascal, is that all the comfort you give me?"

Pah.

deep in the woods we're undiscovered....

There was a naked man in the changing rooms at the gym yesterday. Now, obviously a certain degree of nudity here is normal as, by its very definition, a changing room is a place where people get changed, and when people get changed, there is that inevitable moment of transition from one set of clothes to the other when you will be essentially starkers, give or take a pair of socks. There's also a certain amount of to-ing and fro-ing to the showers, although actual nudity at the showers is generally confined to the actual shower cubicles themselves, with most people either wearing a pair of trunks and on their way to the swimming pool, or firmly wrapped up in their towel. Fleeting nudity, in this context, is tolerable. Brazen nudity, however, is not. You can probably get away with walking to the showers with your towel over your shoulder, but if you don't have a towel with you, then frankly you're just walking about in the buff, and you might just as well have your hands on your hips and your foot on the changing benches as we all try not to catch your eye. Or an eyeful.

I'd just been for a swim, and was just coming down the steps from the pool and on my way into the sauna when I caught sight of this guy: he was walking down the corridor to the showers, butt naked and without a towel, striding purposefully in my direction. Even in an environment where bare flesh is fairly commonplace, his total nudity stood out a mile. Naturally, I frowned my disapproval and turned a sharp right into the sauna as he turned the other way into the showers. I was alone in the sauna, and so, without really thinking about it, I selected a seat on the topmost bench facing the glass door and the shower cubicles beyond. This ill-considered seat selection meant I had a grandstand view when the naked man emerged from his shower cubicle. He had no towel, of course, so he proceeded to attentively and unhurriedly smooth the water from his body. From his whole body. His whole body. Now, I wouldn't do this in the privacy of my own bathroom, nevermind in the middle of a busy gym changing room. Still, each to their own, I suppose..... except now he walked straight towards me and pushed open the door into the sauna.

Now, I know that in scandinavia it is commonplace for people to be completely nude in saunas. I've been to Finland a couple of times, and I know that this is the way things are done and have done it myself. The thing about that is that it is considered ill-mannered and unhygienic to do this unless you take in some paper-towelling that you then sit on. In the UK, at least in my gym, we tend to wear our trunks or our towels when in the sauna. Well, it has wooden benches, so the idea of someone's naked arse and sweaty undercarriage sat on a porous surface like that is pretty horrible, isn't it? Anyway, naked guy came into the sauna, but instead of sitting down quietly, he shut the door and then, still standing up, he pressed his back against the wooden wall next to the door. That was odd enough, but he then proceeded to move his body slowly against the wall, as though he was scratching his back, or, heaven help us, his arse. He did this for about thirty seconds, and then sat down. After another thirty seconds, he then began squirming around again, and this time it was impossible to shift the impression that he was trying to ease some discomfort by rubbing his naked backside against the wooden seating in the sauna..... After about a minute of this, I got up and left.

I don't know how often that sauna gets cleaned, but I'll bet it isn't ofen enough, and I'm not sure that my swimming trunks are protection enough against whatever is being ground into those wooden benches in the sauna. I'm also pretty sure that the shower gel in the showers is not disinfectant enough to provide any real protection either.

There are worse things to catch than swine flu, you know.

Ick.

territorial pissings....

If you'll pardon the lowering of the tone (and there are very few places where what I'm about to say wouldn't lower the tone, and I'm pretty sure that the ones where it doesn't are not really places that people like you or I would tend to frequent)..... it never fails to amaze me quite how disgusting the gents toilets can be.

I'm not talking about those dank squat affairs that you still occasionally find in places like rural France, South America or Africa. Oh no. When you're travelling somewhere remote, a disgusting toilet is pretty much par for the course. After all, hard though it may be to believe, there are still many toilets in the world which aren't systematically cleaned on an annual basis, nevermind on a twice daily basis, and one or two don't have access to fresh running water. I know! No, I'm talking here about the toilets in the head office building of a large, very well known and, you'd imagine, pretty cleanly company. People around here don't generally wear flip-flops and sarongs and have large back packs and horrible dirty white man's dreadlocks; they have neatly cut hair and tend to wear stiff-collared shirts, smart trousers and, more often than not, a tie. There isn't a shortage of clean, running water here. In fact, we have hot and cold running water on demand, and all of the toilets around here are connected to the sewage main and have flushes and everything. There's soap too, and occasionally those little pineapple cubes of bleachy freshness.

So how come they're so disgusting? And they are, let me tell you, utterly revolting. What does it say about the men who work here that we allow these toilets to get into such a state, even when they are all cleaned twice a day? I can understand that, how to put this, sometimes things can come out at an unexpected angle, but I fail to see how that would mean that you might miss a urinal entirely and spray the products of your mecturation all over the wall tiles and the floor. And why spit your chewing gum out into the drain? And am I the only man who doesn't feel the urge to pick my nose whilst standing at the urinal? Is there some kind of unspoken rule that the product of this nasal exploration should be smeared onto the wall next to where you stand?

It's even worse in the cubicles. Is it too hard to lift the toilet seat up before having a piss, or is it no big deal to spray your mark all across the seat and the floor? Is it really? And if you are planning a, shall we say, longer stay, is it really asking too much that you might consider flushing, or even that you might pay a bit of attention to where you are leaving your deposit (no, trust me, the seat is not the right place)? Is it wrong of me to expect that anyone leaving a cubicle might pause to wash their hands with the soap provided before heading back out into the office where they presumably then smear their microscopic particles of shit across everything that they touch? Or that, actually, a small smattering of water sprinkled on your hands after pissing is not really the same thing as spending an extra ten seconds doing the whole thing properly and using a dash of soap? Hell, when the people who do wash their hands throw their used hand towels onto the floor rather than into the bin, perhaps I should be grateful that more people don't wash their hands, else I might not be able to open the door to get inside in the first place.

Quite how people feel able to wash their coffee mugs in here, I really don't know.

Ick.

no more champagne and the fireworks are through....

Judging from the volume of cars crammed into the car park this evening, the credit crunch is apparently having little impact on my gym. It seems that the desire to shed a few pounds around the waist currently still outweighs the need to save a few pounds in the pocket. Only a week ago, in the gap between Christmas and New Year, I had the whole pool to myself, but tonight I was forced to share my lane with three other people. Luckily for me, they were all reasonably considerate swimmers, and I was able to snuffle my way through 42 mildly cold-ridden, ache-y lengths of the pool.

I think it's great that people have made New Year's resolutions to be healthier, even if it means that going to the gym is going to be even more of a pain in the arse for the next few weeks than it is normally. I do the majority of my exercise outdoors, either running or playing 5-a-side football, and I only really go to the gym to use the pool. I might have to wrap up warm against the cold, with a whole pile of hats, gloves, thermal tops and lycra leggings especially for that purpose (calm yourselves), but I won't be spending any time queuing up to use any of the machines in the cardio theatre with sweaty people in ill-advised, overly tight sports kit.

I hope I don't sound snobby, as everybody has to start somewhere, and not so very long ago (well, alright....a decade ago), I was several stone heavier and very much one of them.

Good luck to them, I say.

I hope that for many of them it's the start of a healthier and perhaps happier way of life. Certainly, I think, it's a healthier way of losing weight than the nasty bout of campylobacter that carried away a hefty chunk of my bodyweight inside 10 days and did something to my insides that meant that the weight never came back......

The proof of the pudding, I think, will be how many of them I'm still swimming around come March.

Happy New Year everyone.

Me? I've made no New Year Resolutions, but I have been inspired to start something on the basis of a dream I had last night that featured me having a conversation with Stephen King in my kitchen.... I woke up at 4am and knew what I had to do. It's nothing special mind, but when Stephen King visits you in a dream and suggests you do something, what else can you do? I don't even like the man's books very much, but frankly I'm scared of him and I don't want him to be angry next time he dreamwalks into my head.

it's a fashion that we follow that we should be forgetting...

You know when you walk past someone that you vaguely know, and just at the last possible moment they don't just smile or say hello or something, but they also ask you how you are? They can't seriously be expecting an answer as you both continue to walk in opposite directions, and yet how often do you find yourself stopping, turning around and replying to their ever more distant back, perhaps even going so far as to call out after their back to ask how they're doing? The fact that they keep moving says to me that they're only asking out of pure reflex and they aren't really interested in how you are at all. With that in mind, the logical thing to do is probably to give a quick answer and keep walking, or even to just keep walking. In fact, a smile is probably enough, but no one wants to seem rude, do they? Once the question has been asked, it sort of requires an answer, and conversational norms also dictate that you should follow up your answer with the same polite inquiry. The fact that the other person is now several hundred yards away from you and likely won't even hear you asking is neither here nor there. It's just the way things work.

I sometimes find myself having terrible dilemmas when I see people that I vaguely know standing in a queue that I'm about to join. If I join the line behind them, then small talk is inevitable because horrible, awkward, forced small talk is clearly much better than blanking someone and pretending that they're not there. This happens quite a lot at work, and I have to say that I will quite often delay my coffee for 5 minutes just to avoid a mildly uncomfortable social situation. It's ridiculous. I know it's ridiculous, but there you go.

I don't think I'm very good at small talk. I think I understand the unwritten rules on paper, if you see what I mean, but I have a nasty feeling that my practical application of the theory is woefully lacking. I had to get in work early the other day, so after my first meeting, I joined the breakfast queue to get a bagel. A colleague of mine that I vaguely know joined the same queue moments later. Hiding was not an option, so I resigned myself to the fact that conversation of some kind was now inevitable. I've worked with this person before, so my opening move was a thin smile of acknowledgment. Often that's enough, and far better than a total blank, but I rather think she saw this as encouragement.

"Hello. How are you?"

My usual gambit in conversations like these is to make some weary comment about how near / far we are from the weekend. A shrug and a resigned "It's Monday" will be taken by most people as being a more than adequate response that somehow conveys lots without actually saying a great deal. Similarly, remarking that "things can never be that bad on a Friday" somehow expresses how drab a week in the office is, but also hints at the approaching nirvana of the weekend and all the exciting and possibly nefarious things you have planned. Most importantly of all, neither phrase exactly invites more conversation on either side unless you want it to. A chuckle and a raised eyebrow is more than sufficient. Thus your small talk obligations can be easily fulfilled with one short sentence. This particular day was a Thursday morning though, and still quite early: the weekend still felt a bit far off to discuss. Hm. I tried to keep things simple.

"I'm fine thanks"

I'm aware that the norm here would be to ask my partner in this reluctant conversation how she was in return. I didn't want to leave that door open, so I didn't ask. Is that rude? Do I have to return her feigned interest in me with a feigned interest of my own? Sadly, she clearly expected more from the conversation and persisted.

"Did you have a good weekend?"

Wow. Asking about my weekend on a Thursday? Her grasp of the rules that govern small talk seemed tenuous at best.

"Yes thanks."

Again, no expansion on why my weekend was good and no polite rejoinder to inquire about hers.

"Anything planned for this weekend?"

Sure, the long bank holiday weekend was in sight and this was perhaps a valid inquiry, but she clearly wasn't taking her conversational cues from my increasingly monosyllabic responses. Damn her eyes.

"Nothing much. I've got friends coming up."

There you go. There's some actual information about my weekend. Are you happy? Eh?

"Oh, for the whole weekend?"

Oh for Christ's sake!

"No. Just on Saturday evening"

Luckily, before she could extract from me the vital information that they were coming up around about 7pm and that we were thinking of having a barbeque, her toast appeared and she tottered off to get a coffee, leaving me to wait a few beats longer than necessary when picking up my bagel to make sure that she had actually gone before I went to order my own Americano.

The funny thing is that she actually seems to be a perfectly pleasant person, and I hadn't really set out not to talk to her or anything... I just wasn't really interested enough to have a nothing conversation with her, and ultimately I just wasn't very interested in knowing how she was and what she had planned for the weekend.

Does that make me a bad person? It certainly makes me feel a little socially inadequate.

down by the river....

C. and I went out for a lovely walk up on the moors around Winster in the Peak District on Sunday. It had been pouring with rain when I first woke up, but we decided we would go anyway and, as luck would have it, the weather cleared up nicely around lunchtime. We had originally planned a pub lunch in one of those proper Free Houses that seem to abound in the Peaks, but we were running a little later than planned and decided to just grab something in one of the towns we passed through en-route to the starting point of the walk.

Ripley is a dump, so obviously we weren't going to stop there, and we didn't want to take a chance on there being anything much available in the village of Winster itself, so we stopped in Matlock Bath. This is a small town nestled next to the river in the Derwent valley, with the main street tracking alongside the river as it passes through. It's pleasant enough country, and quite pretty to look at, I suppose, but as we drove into the town itself, I was a little taken aback by what I saw there.

Bearing in mind that we are right, slap-bang in the middle of the country, I was a touch surprised to find that Matlock Bath appears to be rather bizarrely modelled on the classic British seaside town. It's like a mini-Blackpool and the high street is absolutely jam-packed with fish and chip shops (there are at least ten of them over a 400m long strip), amusement arcades, sweet shops selling ice cream, candy floss and rock....hell, they even have some illuminations and make a real thing during 'the season' of having a 'Venetian' parade of boats (which seems all the more remarkable given that the river Derwent at this point is -at most- about 10m wide and is shallow enough that you can see the bottom throughout).

I couldn't help but wonder how this had happened to this little town in Derbyshire, so I looked it up. For much of the late Seventeenth and early Eighteenth centuries, it was customary for members of the aristocracy to spend their summers on a Grand Tour of Europe's great cities. As the political situation in Europe worsened and it became unsafe to travel, it became fashionable to visit attractions within England. Warm springs had been discovered in Matlock Bath in 1698, and they gradually became more and more popular as a destination until they were finally given the ultimate seal of approval by a visit from Queen Victoria in 1831. Lord Byron was apparently so taken with them that he compared the town favourably with Switzerland, leading to the nickname "Little Switzerland". Well, the chocolate may be more Cadbury's than Lindt, but I bet you can't get a really good bit of battered cod with proper malt vinegar in Geneva either....

I think it's fair to say that the clientèle has changed a little since then: not to put too fine a point on it, when we passed through yesterday, the streets were crammed with the kind of people who looked like they might like to holiday in Blackpool with a knotted handkerchief or a 'Kiss Me Quick' hat on their heads. Even as they took in the rarified Derbyshire air in their flammable man-made fabrics, more often than not these people were simultaneously sucking the life out of a cigarette and then exhaling a cloud of smoke all over the infant they held in their arms. I know that sounds snobby, and I'm sure many of them were very nice (the guys in the chippie we went into were incredibly helpful and friendly, for starters) but I'm just saying what I saw yesterday. The famous hot springs that started it all, incidentally have long since been turned into an aquarium and the town has taken its maritime pretensions to the logical extreme by having a lighthouse built.... only in this instance it doesn't so much save mariners from crashing into the rocks as supply southern fried chicken to passers by.

Honestly, it was thoroughly bizarre.

Winster, on the other hand, was a lovely village. Not only is it fantastically situated with a view across the peaks and onto some open moorland, but it was also blessed with cluster of really lovely old stone cottages and - the jewel in the crown - a proper pub. "The Bowling Green" is a free house that serves proper beer sourced from within a 25 mile radius of the pub and serves home-cooked food sourced from local shops. Sadly, I was only stopping for a quick pint before heading home, but it was a lovely pub and I will definitely be returning to have a meal by the fire and sheltered behind those three foot thick brick walls.

I'll maybe look to miss the morris dancing though.

it's gettin' hot in here (hot)....

After I've dragged myself inefficiently up and down the swimming pool fifty-two times, I like to reward myself by flopping out in the sauna for ten minutes or so. Generally, I'll just sit there and try not to think about how hot I feel until I start to feel that sticky-outy bit just on the opening of my ear (what is that called?) starting to burn. If there's a paper in there, I'll read it. What I won't generally do is strike up a conversation with anyone who happens to be in there. If someone talks to me, then I'll answer, but to be honest, it's not really somehwere that I want to be making new friends. On the whole I prefer to make friends with people who aren't naked. Well, most of the time anyway. I am, however, quite often entertained by other people's conversations in the sauna. Yesterday was no exception.

Bloke 1 walks into the sauna and spots a guy that he knows. "Hey there, how's it going? Got a job yet?"

Bloke 2: "Well, I'm doing agency work at the moment, but I've got 5 interviews lined up next week."

Bloke 1: "That's pretty good going. You're bound to get one of those."

Bloke 2: "Yeah, finger's crossed. I tend to do pretty well once I get to the interview stage. I've got a job offer on the table already, but I'm holding out for one of these other jobs."

Bloke 1: "Yeah? More interesting are they?"

Bloke 2: "Yeah. I want a job that doesn't have any responsibility at all, if I can help it. I want to enjoy what I do, do my hours and get home. I don't want to get wrapped up in any politics."

Bloke 1: "I know what you mean. So what have you been doing then?"

Bloke 2: "Agency work for Derby Council. Last week I was out cutting people's grass. It's tiring work, but it's a decent job."

Bloke 1: "Right"

So far, the conversation was only mildly interesting, mainly in the sense that it took my mind off the fact that I was slowly cooking myself and that the rotator muscles in my right arm were hurting from the swim. We were about to take a conversational left-turn though.

Bloke 2: "Mind you. You do meet some funny people on this job."

Bloke 1: "Yeah?"

Bloke 2: "I knocked on a door the other day, and this woman opened it wearing only a bra and knickers."

Bloke 1: "How old?"

Bloke 2: "Well, that doesn't matter as I wasn't interested anyway"

Bloke 1: "Yeah, but how old was she?"

Bloke 2: "Mid-Forties maybe. No - late thirties."

Bloke 1: "Okay then!"

Bloke 2: "She asked me in for a cup of tea"

Bloke 1: "And you said.....?"

Bloke 2: "No thanks love, I'm here to cut the grass."

Bloke 1: "Well, you are taken I suppose"

Bloke 2: "It was the first cut of the year though, and it was a bit damp, so I had to tell her that I wouldn't be able to cut the grass back too much. You know what she said to that?"

Bloke 1: "....."

Bloke 2: "Oh, I know what it's like when it's all wet down there. Are you sure you don't want to come in for a cup of tea?"

Bloke 1: "Bloody hell"

Bloke 2: "I know. No thanks love, I'm only here to cut the grass. You get loads like that."

So apparently things like that DO actually happen. Perhaps in the best traditions of Monty Python, she has a spare room filled with council workers who came to mow the lawn....

My ears were starting to burn, so at this point, like all good reporters, I made my excuses and left.

push it real good....

I went to the gym this evening.

I suppose this isn't really all that remarkable an event in that I go to the gym at least two or three times every week, but this was different: I didn't just go for a swim, oh no. I went to the gym and I got changed into some lycra and I went upstairs and I actually used some of the scary machines.

I used to do this all the time, and in fact I have been member at this gym for something like seven or eight years. I've never been particularly into weights (as witnessed by the punyness of my arms), but for at least the first five years of that time, I could regularly be found in what I believe is called "The Cardio Theatre", thrashing my heart and lungs and generally dripping sweat onto some of the expensive machinery. A couple of years ago though, I started making a real effort to go running outside (an activity that had previously been confined to Saturday mornings). As the climate in this beautiful country usually means that it is either dark or pissing with rain or both when I leave the office, I took to getting away from my desk in my lunch-hour and running alongside the river Trent. As I was now getting my exercise outdoors, I only needed to go to the gym for a swim....and the pool is nice enough that I still consider the membership fee well worth paying. The cardio theatre kind of went by the wayside and wasn't really missed at all.

On the whole, I much prefer running outdoors. It's much less boring, for starters, and it somehow feels as though it's doing me more good actually running properly and not pretending to run on one of those spongey machines. I now go whatever the weather, and although it's sometimes a bit of a struggle, I love the righteous feeling I get for having done it and I relish the chance to get away from my desk to blow all the cobwebs away.

For one reason or another though, I found myself back in the main section of the gym this evening........ Oh my goodness, how things have changed. I felt a bit as though I had been taken out of cryogenic freezing and brought back to life at some point in the distant future. The machines have all changed. I just about recognised the bikes, but even then the controls had changed to an extent that I sat there for a good 2 minutes trying to look like I knew what I was doing before I actually started to pedal. The running machine and the elliptical training thing were basically the same I suppose, but the steppers now have people moving their knees at really weird, wonky looking angles that make them look like they're mincing (well, they are on a stepper, for heaven's sake....). As for that odd stepping/walking thing that looks a bit like it has a mini treadmill for each foot that moves independently of the other.... well, I was curious enought to try that one out. It seemed simple enough, but as I confidently upped the speed, I nearly went flying off the back and had to press the emergency stop button. Hmmm. I decided that discretion was the better part of valour at this point and beat a hasty but (I trust) dignified tactical retreat.

Some things never change at the gym though, and as I headed down to the changing rooms and a well earned sauna, I was very pleased to see those tubby looking blokes with moobs and fingerless gloves still desperately trying to lift weights that are clearly far too heavy for them.... yeah, best have a rest for a moment and a sip of that protein shake as you've clearly not had enough calories already today, and that curry is still an hour away in the future.

Anyway.

I think I'll go to the gym again tomorrow, actually..... but I reckon I'll just slink off back to the pool this time.