Fail again fail better. So notes one of Samuel Beckett’s relentless voices with characteristic grim humour and bleak stoicism. Discordantly I found this line printed on someone’s t-shirt in the gym the other day. A fellow Beckett-lover perhaps.More likely, the mantra of a muscle builder. Only by tearing the muscle through heavy training can the muscle rebuild bigger. Muscle is increased through failure. Fail again fail better. A perfectly logical mantra for a body builder.

And so we have the strange collision of Samuel Beckett and the modern world of weight training. Culture high and low. A collision I like. My own personal snobbery is to shun the middle brow. I like Coronation Street and Proust; Man Utd and Mahler; A way forward in snobbery. Le nouveau snobisme.