You spin me right round, baby right round.

I did the Spinner class at the gym today. For anyone not in the loop, it was the craze of two years ago, after celebrities like Cameron Diaz, Tara Reid and Jennifer Aniston all started doing it in the gym. It's basically a group cycling exercise, but it's quite fantasy based in that the intructor constructs a narrative in which you immerse yourself. You competitively cycle to thumpingly grandiose music, all the while the instructor 'encourages' you along.

Anyway, it was quite a good class, but he chose to narrate a 'Gladiator' fantasy, in which we imagined we were riding along with Russell Crowe and had to cross some bridges. We rode along with Maximus Decimus Meridius, dodging the Spartans (or whoever they were), and after a lungbusting ride made it across the bridge to safety, with a few casualities along the way.

Now, I'm not one to complain when it comes to fantasy roleplaying, however, this one wasn't exactly to my tastes.

When you're cycling along the Seven Hills of Rome, and the only thing you can see in front of you are the rotating buttocks of a Janet Street Porter lookalike, the last thing you want to visualise is Russell Crowe in a metallic thong.

Then it just gets confusing.