Shane Hegarty's encyclopaedia of modern Ireland
There's nothing more likely to make a person feel bad about themselves than the sight of 100 bouncing silhouettes in a gym window, while you're sitting at the traffic lights having decided to drive to the shop rather than brave the three-minute walk. When confronted with that sight, you know there is only one course of action: call the gym and ask them to pull the blinds.
One of the chief reasons the gym has become so popular is that it is pretty much the only sport you can do while simultaneously watching Richard & Judy. And if you could play senior hurling while listening to your iPod, then maybe team sports wouldn't be in such decline.
There are also few other physical activities that encourage you to take regular breaks to strut in front of the mirror for a few minutes.
You could try it during a game of rugby, but it's unlikely to go down too well.
The new year is a busy time for gyms, a time when people walk in with great intentions but generally work up the biggest sweat scrambling to get out of the place. There is nothing more intimidating that a first visit to a gym. Standing at a weight machine and wondering if you should pull that lever or rest your belly on it. Realising too late that opening a bottle of Lucozade on a treadmill can have terribly sticky consequences. And, for an individual pursuit, there is an unspoken competitiveness between gym-goers, with a complex language of grunts and sighs used to tell the rest of the gym just how they've worked out, just how much they deserve to strut about in the front of the mirror for a moment.
For the gym newcomer, it can be unnerving to see that extend to the changing room. It is terribly off-putting when some gym addict, his body lumpen like a bag of doorknobs, insists on blow-drying his hair while presuming that the rest of the room is as comfortable with his body as he is.
Yet it is one of the great ironies of Irish life that at the same time as we're experiencing an obesity epidemic, there is an explosion in the personal fitness business. We're getting fitter at the same time as we're getting fatter.
Maybe we're stuffing our faces with ice cream while we're running on the treadmill. Or pigging out on donuts on every second stroke of the rowing machine. Either way, something's going badly wrong. Is there now such competition in the gym business that they're offering a free rotisserie chicken to new members?