Part of the pleasure of the King's Hall gym is that there's plenty to take your mind off the agony of exertion. Soundless televisions pump news or pop videos, many of the latter mining that old, rich seam of soft core S&M imagery and so reminding you that some truly savour suffering. Occasionally - very occasionally, for a gentleman of my advancing years - the day's selection of radio station will serve up a track that picks up your treadmill pace cathartically. It's the surprise of it as much as anything. I'd never dreamed that Jocelyn Brown and I would together trim a full 23 seconds off my personal best for five kilometres.
Then there are the people. You get most of the Hackney range: from young adults to those pushing deep enough into middle-age to have entered Freedom Pass territory; women and men in roughly equal quantities; black people; white people; Turkish or maybe Kurdish people; people with East European accents I can't place more precisely than that; on one occasion an intrepid Orthodox Jew, making not one concession to the gym's dress code; fat people; thin people; slightly-built people; bulged bicep people, one or two of whom make fearful, ecstatic grunting sounds when lifting weights.
You get chatterers, chums, one or two couples and the occasional flirt. But these aren't typical. Even in this communal space, running, lifting, rowing and pedalling are essentially solitary pursuits, each participant occupying their own mental as well as physical space. What are we thinking about?
I suppose it's not just me alternating between watching the time and distance counters - comforting and torturing myself with mental division sums as the digits change - and trying to take my mind off them. The televisions and the people come in handy for that task. But I Iook at the others in all their human array and can only really speculate. Are they mentally pondering shopping? Sex? Money? God? Do they notice, like me, that there aren't very many Asian men or, in particular, women.
Have they spotted the Muslim girls looking through the glass portion of the doors and wondered if they're thinking they would like to be pumping iron or cross-training, or maybe just thinking they're glad they're not? Or wondered what they have been doing elsewhere in the leisure centre, where so many body culture codes and gender customs cross over or co-exist with so little apparent stress, except, perhaps, on the lungs and knee joints. Have they simply looked at the society of the gym and the centre as a whole and reached the same conclusion as me - that although few words are spoken, it's a remarkably companionable place to be?
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