My ideal morning workout routine goes something like this: I turn up at the gym at about 7am, drag a mat from the stack and begin some preliminary stretching; at about 7.06am I get a text from the trainer I’ve booked, telling me that he has a domestic emergency and won’t be able to make it, whereupon I ease into a standing position and punch the air while no one is looking. Then I go home and get into the bath.

In over a decade of gym-going, I experienced this only five or six times, but I always woke up in the morning with the same hope.

Then at the beginning of lockdown last spring, I was struck by a revelation.

“You know what?” I said, pulling a Cornetto from the freezer. “When this is over, I’m never going to a gym again.”

“You haven’t been for five months anyway,” my wife said.

“What’s the point?” I said. “I can just exercise here.”

I bought a gym mat, and tucked it under the kitchen sofa. I ordered a skipping rope, and used it for exactly 15 minutes. Over the summer, I grew slack, and then started to seize up. A leaflet for a local pilates instructor came through the letterbox. My wife went along for a one-hour assessment and, on her recommendation, so did I.

“See if it’s cheaper,” I said, “if we do it together.”

Of the couples I knew from the gym who exercised together, it always seemed to me there was one committed partner, and one who got away with gliding along in the other’s slipstream. I was determined to be the latter.

“Your mother sucks up all the oxygen in the room,” I told the oldest one after the first session.

“Oh,” my wife said.

“Which is good, in principle,” I said. “I should be able to slack off while she’s claiming the instructor’s attention.”

“All the oxygen in the room,” my wife said. “I’m rather hurt by that.”

“I’m actually working,” said the oldest, pointing at his laptop.

“But somehow I ended up doing more,” I said. “There will be a way to cheat – I just haven’t worked it out yet.”

On Wednesday at 7.45am, I am woken by my wife shrieking my name. She is standing on the other side of the bedroom, in the dark.

“What?” I say.

“Help me!” she says, through gritted teeth. “It’s my back!”

I lead her gently back to bed, and put an extra pillow under her head.

“God, that hurts,” she says. “I just need to lie here.”

“You need to move,” I say. She swivels an angry eye toward me.

“Is this because you don’t want to go to pilates by yourself?” she says.

“No,” I lie. “I saw it on one of those ambulance shows. People are always getting stuck in their loungers, and the paramedics always tell them to move.”

“I don’t need to move,” she says. “I’ve got my phone.”

“Actually,” I say, holding up her phone, “I’ve got it.”

At 8.54am I step into the pilates instructor’s consulting room, followed at a short distance by my wife, her shoulders hunched, picking her way across the room as if through broken glass.

“Then he took my phone away,” she says.

“Actually, it’s good that you’re here,” the instructor says, her voice softened by a face mask and a visor. “We want to get it moving.”

“That’s what he said,” my wife says, lying down on a mat.

“Tough love,” I say, stepping on to the reformer.

“He also says I need a physiotherapist,” my wife says. “Do you know anyone?”

“I’m a physiotherapist,” the instructor says.

“Well, there you are,” I say. I push out sideways with my left foot, against the springs of the reformer, concentrating on my breathing while my wife and the instructor discuss connective tissue and levels of pain relative to childbirth. I lose count, and start over. My thighs burn. I get to 12, then lose count again. I’ll have nothing left for the other leg, I think. Finally, with my balance beginning to falter, I stand, and exhale sharply. The instructor looks up from my wife’s prone form.

“Having a bit of a rest, Tim?” she says.