There’s a droll Twitter account named Very British Problems that is mainly about over-apologising. It just summed up winter: “December: A lot of people doing the pub wrong. January: A lot of people doing the gym wrong. February: Pancakes.” Amateurs ruin everything until pancakes, in which we are all amateurs.

It’s too late for a discourse on pub etiquette, which is moot, anyway. The main way to do the pub wrong is to get too drunk and sloppy. But the seasoned drinker only pretends to mind: really, we see you as learner drivers, a darned nuisance but necessary, if we want to bring up the next generation of binge drinkers.

With gyms, however, there is so much to get wrong. You mix up miles and kilometres and hurl yourself off a treadmill. Everything you pick up will be too heavy, unless it’s tiny, and you look ridiculous – like a giant exercising. Your kit looks like pyjamas because that’s what it was until this morning, your trainers were made before training was invented and you’re using your arms on a leg machine. And please God tell me you haven’t wandered into a class without checking whether it was pump or zumba.

Even in the moments between each egregious error, you have a squirrelly, hunted look, because you can’t stop – there is nothing more suspicious, more scorned, than inactivity in a gym. But you also know that, whatever you do next, it will involve toning your elbow while improving the flexibility of your arse.

Your best hope is that nobody’s watching, but this is the greatest of your vanities. The regulars are scoping your every move, they’re waiting till you get something so wrong they can report you, even if only to one another. They loathe you, but it’s not your fault, except in the sense that the gym is now too full because you are in it. The only way to get a gym right in January is to go at 2am.