At the gym I’m doing arms and chest and talking to Andy, the guy I see every time I go to the gym or to a club, he’s always there, he’s always super-friendly, I don’t know if he fancies me but we’ve known each other for so long now and he’s never made a move that it doesn’t really seem likely. I know absolutely nothing about him other than his name, his training regime and his drug preferences. I don’t know where he lives, where he works, if he’s got a boyfriend – he could be a serial killer for all I know, and then when they interview me on the news I’ll be the one saying, ‘He always seemed like such a nice, normal guy.’ Andy is friends with all the serious gym people and tonight I find out why, because for the first time, after hinting about it for weeks, he asks me outright if I need any steroids, because if I do he can get them for me. I say no thanks, but I’ll bear it in mind for the future, and we carry on chatting about creatine and protein shakes and carbloading as if nothing has happened, which I suppose it hasn’t although I think it’s probably illegal to sell steroids. For all I know it’s illegal to buy them as well, in which case a hell of a lot of the people I know are going to end up in jail.

For the record, I don’t do steroids because a) I don’t want to get huge, and b) I don’t want high blood pressure, acne, baldness, heart attacks, loss of libido, low sperm count, testicular atrophy, liver damage, depression or mood swings. I’ve mentioned this to one or two people and they look at me as if I’ve just started speaking in Uzbekistani, or whatever they speak in Uzbekistan.

Anyway the penny finally drops about why Andy has such big muscles when he seems to spend his whole time in the gym chatting to people. I look at him a little more carefully this evening and I notice that his back is quite spotty. I’m surprised I never noticed it before.

After an hour I have a shower, and avoid the glance of the guy I call Sauna Slut, who comes into the changing room, gets undressed and goes straight into the shower, doesn’t even bother to go into the gym to make a pretence of working out. Then he spends the rest of the evening going to and from the shower and the sauna, occasionally coming out into the changing area to cool down a bit and stare at people like me, as if he could hypnotise us into following him. He’s actually not bad looking, and he does have a very big one, but he looks so mad that I try not to catch his eye. Who knows, if I ever get desperate enough I’ll smile at him and see what happens. He’d probably run a mile.