In one of the later short stories in Michael Farrell’s The Victoria Principle, a man anonymised as ‘Bill’ is prompted by an anecdote recounted in a university swimming pool change room to reflect on possible excuses not to arm-wrestle. This does not seem to have been a topic of interest for Bill previously. Indeed, the narrator concedes that for Bill’s ‘milieus (overlapping academic and creative)’ arm-wrestling was given little thought, if any.

As Bill analyses the merits of various arm-wrestle-related excuses on the internet, and others that he formulates himself (‘I have a B12, or iron, deficiency’, ‘I’m already dead’), an offbeat comedy is generated by the accumulation of this seemingly unpromising material. If these reflections are part of Bill’s attempt to utilise the change-room anecdote ‘to perhaps use in a story’, they are also transformed when the story pivots (via a dream and a trip to the therapist) to consider deeper motivations for an otherwise trivial fixation.