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Sunday 29th January 2006

Circumstances at the swimming pool get stranger and stranger. There were two lifeguards today, both of them men and neither very attractive. One of them was the fattest and most unfit looking man I have ever seen working at a gym. He wasn't massively fat, it's just that usually the staff of these places are pretty thin. If Holmes Place seriously think that I am going to fantasise about someone like him being my secret boyfriend then they have another think coming. I can just look in the mirror and pretend my reflection is someone else if that's the kind of thing I'm into and save myself £75 a month. They were trying to sweeten the deal by adding another extra man into the mix for me, hoping that I would be tempted into the depravity of an imaginary gay menage a trois, but although I would like to experiment more in that direction I at least have some standards in terms of looks (I would have to be the ugliest person involved in such a threesome) and really would prefer at least one of the other participants to be female or I fear we'd all just have to sit around talking about football or cars, two subjects which I have little to no interest in. Whoever is staffing the pool at my gym must think I am a right unfussy pervert.
I just liked the girl who used to work there, OK? And only in my imagination. I'm not your lifeguard whore!
As I was leaving after my swim another member of staff came in through the male changing room doors. He wasn't a lifeguard, which was a shame as he was miles better looking than the two specimens they had put on display. He said to me, "Are you here for the kick-boxing?"
Now this seemed like an odd question to ask an overweight man who is wearing swimming trunks and is soaking wet and is in the pool area of the gym.
"No," I replied.
"Oh, you're not here for the kick-boxing," he reasserted and then turned around and headed back to the changing rooms.
What was going on there? It seemed such an out of place question for him to come into the pool area to ask just the one person who happened to be leaving that I wondered if kick-boxing was some kind of gym code. Possibly that's the code for a homosexual foursome, but it seemed more likely to me that the man didn't work for the gym and was in fact some kind of spy who had arranged to have a meeting with a mole or something in the jacuzzi and this was the sentence by which he would make himself recognised (after all any one actually here for the kick boxing would surely have made their way to the studio where the kick boxing took place). If I had replied, "I was planning on going, but I damaged my feet when I trapped them in a revolving door" or somesuch, he would have known I was the person he was meant to meet. But a slightly confused looking "No" was not the proscribed sentence and so he turned on his heels, terrified that his cover had been blown.
Or maybe he just wanted someone else to go and do kick-boxing.
You decide which is most likely.

My gym is an exciting place. I am very much looking forward to going back in to discover how low the attractiveness of their staff can go. I should get very fit at this rate.

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