My gym is making the switch to Richard Branston's evil Virgin empire. This morning I went in to try and shake off a couple of my Christmas pounds and was given a new Virgin swipe card (which apparently doesn't give me access to all Virgin gyms, only the ones that used to be Holmes Place) and a free Virgin rucksack. That's not bad. Free stuff. Even if I have more than enough bags already.
But when I went into the men's changing rooms I was surprised to see a young girl of about seven or eight standing by the lockers. Was this part of the new Branston service? One would hope not, but it has never happened before and so if someone were to jump to such a conclusion it would be possible to see why they had. As far as I am concerned Richard Branston, the gents changing room is for gents and not for girls and I don't care how many times you have tried to fly a big balloon round the world.
I was a bit self conscious, though luckily I had come in my gym gear so didn't have to disrobe in front of this unwanted interloper. But as I got myself ready the girl's dad appeared with her younger sister, who had no clothes on. "Branston is pushing it too far now", I thought, "This is beyond the pale. If he wants to jazz up the changing rooms then maybe some bare 18 year old women would be acceptable, but not children. That is just wrong.
Of course there is the possibility that the decision to allow the girls in was nothing to do with Branston and that the dad had unilaterally decided to keep his children with him, not wanting to leave them alone in the women's changing room, a famous haunt for paedophiles. Much safer to have them sitting around on their own and running around naked in a room full of naked men.
I guess when you are a parent you have to make decisions like this occasionally and doubtless there are times when you are forced to transgress the norms of society, but I didn't like this one bit.
When I was less embarrassed by the shock of this intrusion I realised that the appearance of young girls in the men's changing rooms on the day when the gym changed over to Virgin was just an awful coincidence.
Probably something I should have made clearer when I decided to discuss the incident on the Andrew Collings show. At least I thought I did. The whole section seems to have mysteriously disappeared from the listen again feature. As I have discussed elsewhere the spontaneous nature of comedy can sometimes lead to things coming out slightly wrongly and whilst it is fine to discuss paedophiles, it is apparently not a good thing to imply that a large multinational corporation accommodates paedophiles in its gyms. Has the world gone mad. If a slightly confused man can't pointlessly accuse Richard Branston of havingh naked young girls in his gyms without any evidence to prove that it was his idea, in a garbled fashion that makes no sense, then Al Quaida has won.
But I will apologise for my indiscretion in any case. Albeit after I have more or less just repeated the entire thing again. I am sure Richard Branston has a sense of humour.
