When I had a bad back, I used to go to a special gym for people with musculoskeletal pain. My father had been recommending it for years but of course I paid no attention to him. It was only when someone else also spoke highly of it that I thought it might be worth a try. Kieser Training is a Swiss company specialising in strength training whose UK branch (RIP) was located in the basement of the art deco Carreras Cigarette Factory building in Mornington Crescent. The effigies of two enormous black cats guard its entrance, and the façade is adorned with the faces of further black cats that stare down at the street with yellow eyes. The gym, by contrast, was delightfully utilitarian, with no music or TV screens, just a large room full of complicated-looking machinery into which comparatively tiny people were folded, slowly raising and lowering their limbs
