Midnight Weatherman got a letter through the door asking if he’d like to join the gym for free. He didn’t join, of course - his six-pack attests to the fact he’s already a member somewhere else - but it explains why the place is becoming so unbearably crowded.

The car park was almost full and the machines were pretty much all in use when I arrived this evening - as they always are - and the hippo class was making big waves in the pool, marching around in chest-deep circles with dumb-bell shaped floats in their hands. Around and around and around they go, stiring up a fierce current you have no chance of swimming against.

So, I chatted to Jon in the changing room for a while, then mooched out onto the gym floor a did a short run on the machines, waiting for them to empty out of the pool.

I guess it was good to have a bit of variety.

A new stack of The Edge, Chelmsford’s rather lame ‘humourous’ magazine, had appeared at the door by the time I left. Usually well worth walking straight past (Sainsbury’s has stopped stocking it, although Tesco has yet to see the light), something made me pick one up this time around.

There was little as ever in it, but one letter, apparently factual, contained the following:

The Japanese language … must surely rate as the most complex ever devised. They use four alphabets. The first in Kanji, which has 10,000 characters, of which 2,000 are in common usage. Each is pronounced in either the original Chinese or Japanese form and each consists of 24 strokes which must be written in the correct stroke order… Each character may have a number of totally different meanings but, when combined with another character, another set of meanings is entirely possible… a sentence can consist of characters from all four alphabets in a continuous string without any breaks to indicate words.

And there was me thinking it might be fun to build on the two Japanese words on my vocabulary (’thanks’ and ‘down the hatch’). I’ll stick to the German.

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