Like many people in Abu Dhabi, I’m often seized by a sudden urge and the inspiration to get fit. One time, I even joined a gym.

After a few strenuous weeks, I started giving the gym a miss in favour of dinner out with my friends and all-you-can-eat Friday brunches. Eventually, I realised that I hadn’t been to the gym in months, and that it was high time to take matters in hand.

One my first day back, I dressed for the gym at home and took my change of clothes with me. In my hurry to get started, I dropped my bag in a corner of the gym rather than securing a locker in the changing room.
In my absence, the gym had undergone major renovations, including new exercise machines and a whole separate gym for women upstairs. Content to stick with the familiar and get stuck in, I chose the mixed gym downstairs.

After a rigorous work out, I rushed into the changing room to take a shower and change my clothes. My first thought upon entering the dressing room was that it looked like a tornado had hit. There were clothes everywhere – on the floor, in piles on the bench: it was a real mess.

Judgmental of these slovenly women, I began to prepare for the shower when, to my surprise and horror, a man walked into the dressing room. I could not begin to control my indignation.

“What are you doing in here?” I shouted at him. “This is the ladies’ changing room!”

It took the poor flustered man a few minutes to defend himself in his second language – he kept saying it was the men’s changing room – but I knew it was the same room I’d always used before.

It was at the same time as I noticed the crisp white kandoora hanging on a hook with a red and white checked keffiyeh and black agal beside it, that the accused intruder pointed to the huge sign on the changing room door that I’d missed: “Men’s changing room. Ladies changing room has been moved upstairs.”

Strangely enough, my fitness urges have thoroughly disappeared; I haven’t been back to that gym since.