I normally don’t do breakfast if I’m going to the gym in the morning, but I had an appointment with the fitness police at 11.15, so had toast while I checked my email.

Trevor, Paul and I were booked into our first Complete Physique class and when we arrived it looked like we were going to be the only three in there. Fortunately several others appeared from somewhere and followed us in, making the numbers up to two dozen and hiding us somewhere among the crowd.

The instructor, a rubbery woman in her early thirties, helped us get together the steps and weights and mats we’d need, and a pushy man who either wanted to be mean or prove that he was strong advised us to use the heaviest weights on the rack. We were wise enough to treat him with the suspicion he deserved and started out half way up the scale - something of which we were all quite glad once things got underway.

When I first switched to that gym from the one in London I’d intended to do a lot of the classes, but it’s a year and a month since the last time I was in one. That was step class, when I discovered that women in their mid-fifties were more coordinated than men in their late twenties, and I retreated to the relative safety of twelve months on the running and rowing machines.

This wasn’t so bad, though. It was hard work, but easy enough to follow and I didn’t keep on jumping in the wrong direction every time and crashing into Trevor. I came out of it with tired arms, but feeling quite springy and ready for the day.

I showered with a two-inch spider, then changed and popped into Tesco on the way to Link to buy fruit and doughnuts for the studio.

The signal is very good this year, and I could easily pick it up around Ingatestone, which is about ten miles from the transmitter, so by the time I arrived I’d already been listening for a while. Martin and Jill were on the air with Bringing up your Sunday Lunch, a show I used to produce years and years ago.

Fortunately I’d picked up a copy of the Observer at the gym so I sat reading that while I waited for them to finish the show. The Review section had a feature on what various celebs would be reading on their holidays this year. Seeing what Lisa Jardine, chair of the Booker Judges, will be slipping in her suitcase, you have to wonder what the panel will be looking for when they pick this year’s Booker winner:

Along with the crate of books I’ll need to read before the Booker meeting in August, I’ll be taking The Glass Bathyscape: How Glass Changed the World by Alan MacFarlane and Gerry Martin (Profile Books,

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