Heaven V?

The Holmes Place chain of gyms was recently taken over by Richard Branson’s unstoppable-despite-being-crap-at-everything Virgin empire, so our Crouch End branch is currently being rebranded. Now that we have the tacky Virgin Active logo emblazoned everywhere we look, I am starting to notice some additional changes which also typify the Virgin approach to business. Suddenly, like on their Pendolino trains, the toilets are out of order. The timetables are in chaos. There aren’t enough machines or locker space available to meet the demands of the sudden but annual upsurge in attendance of members with resolutions at the start of a New Year. The swimming pool is closed for essential engineering works. We are promised 20 million pounds of investment which so far seems to have gone into buying impractical black sweat (and I mean sweat) shirts for the personal trainers to wear, changing the name of the health and beauty spa into something too embarrassing for the reception staff to say (see the title of this entry) when they answer the phone, and nasty new-look membership cards. No doubt as more investment pours into the club the old adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” will be ignored and any money will be ill-used and impractically spent and everything will end up being worse than before. And no doubt unless we book our training sessions or swims four weeks in advance, eventually walk-in membership prices will soar. Holmes Place was in debt and our fees were being used to pay off overdraft interest, so something needed to be done, but what a shame that a takeover wasn’t offered by a company with a greater sense of style and experience in the sporting world. Why couldn’t Virgin have just stuck to making records? And why oh why is that grinning man with the trimmed beard, bad cardigans and ballooning ambitions so bloody successful?

REBECCA