NORTH LONDON WHERE BEING VERY SLIGHTLY BETTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE COSTS AN ENORMOUS AMOUNT MORE MORE MONEY

Once upon a time the municipal pool was a brutal concrete chamber of drafty horrors where acned boys could flirt with palid girls who could in turn sneak a peek up their shorts. A watery, Dickensian workhouse of violent ducking and bombing, of verrucas and athelete’s foot, of cold hard tiles and blocked toilets, of adenoidal screeching and enthusiastic petting.

Then the fun police stepped in - capitalists masquerading as health and safety - bringing with them a lick of paint, an overpriced cafe and swimming classes for the nearly dead; The Leisure Centre was born.

Back then, when I was young, I didnt have time for this fitness nonsense; If I wanted exercise, I went for a walk or had some sex. But as a hard-working drone parent, while working at Sky I figured maybe I could evade weighing a million kilos by attending the onsite free gym, only to be bossed around by a “personal trainer”, the one person in the entire organisation who didn’t have a proper job; it was too ridiculous.

But my forties arrived with a free gift; bad back and stress, courtesy of my corporate whoredom, of all that competition we were told was so good for us. I discovered that leisure centres have saunas and steam rooms and pools. I could use my salary to pay for the alleviation of the stress brought on by earning my salary. No that irony was not lost on me.

Sadly, like all public-private facilities, these non-leisurely leisure centres were a bit rubbish. We became acquainted with a whole new world of germs and frustration, where round every cheerfully-tiled corner lurked a used tampon, an abandoned poo-filled nappy, a puddle of piss. A world of broken facilities and indifferent shrugs, of pool water filled with tepid human effluent and nostril-stripping chlorine. After Covid the misery was compounded by kafkaesque booking systems that killed spontaneity, accessibility, comprehension.

So I went private. I went to The Laboratory, without doubt the most pretentiously-named gym in the Western World.

So here we are in leafy Ally Pally, North London, home of the corporate lawyer, the television executive, the yummy mummy, home of people who do ALL their shopping in Waitrose, people who, despite owning two homes and three cars you still wouldnt shag. Not even drunk. How do they procreate? Does it involve a turkey baster?

So what do you get for your money, Adam? Is the question on the lips of the three people still reading despite my best attempts to bore you with digression.

Well, instead of the bants and camaraderie and egalitarian affection and the noisy, splashy, joyful giggling Dunkirk spirit of an ordinary leisure centre, here there is an oppressive quiet.
Here be the sussuration of library murmurs, the grim judgemental stares.

A passing bug-eyed fiftysomething woman with the scrawny legs of an underfed chicken and a coffee-dark sunbed perma-tan grimly glares at my outie belly-button - the little pink beacon atop the hairy slope of my belly, like the glace cherry on a pale rum baba that is the legacy of a lifetime of snatched meals and English starchy food - as if perhaps imagining her own flat-arsed, wrinkly appearance is the correct benchmark.

Two fortysomething guys loll bleakly in the hot tub, like models from the bald-and-tubby edition of the Boden catalogue. Three hefty soccer mums huddle round their loungers, cackling, discretely as if in a scene from MacBeth done with swimsuits. Everyone is white. And unattractive. And unhappy. They have all this money and this is all they got?

And so. The sauna at least is hot and very clean. The steam room is scalding and also very clean. Clean is the one thing they definitely do here, although I notice the walls of the pool are furred with the early stages of mould.

I swim slowly. It’s been a while. A very old man swims past me. A woman with one arm swims past me. I finally accept just how unfit I am as an abandoned flip flop slowly floats past me. My kippered lungs wheeze out my exhaustion like a battered accordion. I have swum one length. It’s been three years, okay? Thats my excuse.

And suddenly, hideous dance music pounds from a stereo. Poolside, a young spandexed Exercise Nazi leaps about screeching, and 80% of the pool is transformed into a seething mass of bobbing wrinklies, a geriatric army of animated Anthony Gormley statues churning, churning, cheerfully churning. Aquaerobics for the Elderly! Kill me now! The sorry reminder of what is round the corner for me? I dont want it!

We the swimmers are now squeezed into one tight lane, forced to shrink aside in the wake of the panting hyperswimmer, you know the one, the windmilling human torpedo of alpha-maledom that haunts every pool. Okay, I’m done here.

So. What exactly then did I pay for? A slight improvement in facilities and cleanliness, except - guess what - I caught a cold! It seems that however exclusive your club, however high the fees, there is still someone ignorant enough to bring their germs and viruses in when the decent thing would be to stay at home. It’s almost like I just dropped a chunk of money to have the same ghastly thing we once used to get for free courtesy of all that tax we were paying. Only this shit has an extra lick of paint, this shit is monopolised by grimacing, miserable rich white people, this shit goes up to eleven. Like the “luxury apartments” peppered along our busiest arterial roads and industrial no-go areas, like the Taste the Difference food that never tastes any different, like all the extra channels and streaming services showing you content YOU’VE ALREADY SEEN, like all the new products and services that don’t deliver anything new, once again we are reminded that money doesnt actually buy you much of anything, that, once again, the myth of the market is revealed as the bleak joke it is. And that joke, my friends, is on us.