We are told being non-judgemental is a virtue, that discrimination is a vice, and that the avoidance of prejudice is not merely possible but laudable. Perhaps the quickest way to give the lie to these statements is to reveal to you that I am a 53-year-old man who regularly goes to the gym. What are we to make of someone of advanced middle age who nevertheless spends some of his few remaining hours lifting bits of metal up and putting them down again? Prejudice, I fear, suggests the worst.

In the gyms I attend, the mirrors show a mix of the youthful and good-looking, the muscled and toned. Then there are the very fat, with their looks of wild hope or sinking doubt, the smattering of the ordinary and eccentric. And in among all these figures, lightly paunched and wearing a threadbare T-shirt that my wife would........

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