Gym'll Fix It

If you’ve long harboured a hankering for gyms to return to proper, manly places where an oaf can put on big shorts and hit another oaf whilst eating a fried egg and Mother’s Pride sandwich -  then Murderers is probably for you. Having myself the perfect heterosexual physique (a potato with four cocktail sticks for limbs) I was convinced that someone, somewhere was having a laugh at my expense when the leaflet came through the door last weekend. It was a striking sort of flyer, unbleached tripe with the details scratched deep with what looked to be biro. Worried as I was to be faced with an array of gleaming knees, gaunt faces topped with bulging eyes, and the sort of thighs one more normally sees on an especially well exercised turkey it was then with some initial relief that I found quite the very opposite.

In Murderers there are no rowing machines, no exercise machines of any kind that I could see (which was probably as well as I’ve not the first idea what any of them would be called). What there was, was a boxing ring, a side of lamb hung from the ceiling and a lot of the sort of medicine balls and bowling pins that you only normally see being hurled at policemen from the windows of a Leyland Tiger by the girls of St Trinian’s.

Here ugly, malformed men punched more just like themselves so as to send one another’s teeth in prepaid envelopes to Gold R Us. Other men sat and scratched their enormous balls with a broken bottle. Across the gym a young man was being shown how to batter his prospective wife, whilst another was being buggered for ‘being a poof’. Three of the fattest sat who somewhat like the Graeae had to share amongst them, in their case, a capstan full-strength and a single opinion, rather than a tooth and an eye.

I left whilst still I was able and if I remain for the now the same shape, then it is perhaps better to eat a pie than be one.