Acquiesce

My wife thinks that I should swim more – it would be good for me – and whilst it is difficult to argue that the exercise would, indeed, be beneficial, there are as always other unassailable truths that must be taken into account: a) I hate swimming and b) I hate public swimming baths even more.  I argued that any physical benefit I might accrue would be more than cancelled out by the mental anguish I would suffer.  “My personal discomfort in such circumstances would,” I ventured “impact negatively on your own enjoyment of the experience…” or words to that effect.  She was not persuaded and thus, it goes without saying, I acquiesced…

The swimming pool changing room is a very particular place of torture.  You undress in a booth in which there is insufficient space to bend down and remove your own socks.  (And there is certainly no room for somebody else to do it.)  The floor is a puddle through which everything below waist level is dragged.  All hooks, pegs and rails appear to have been removed from the walls just in case, I presume, someone should decide to take the easy way out.  Anyway…

Eventually costumed – albeit with numerous vertebrae completely disassociated from their customary positions – I emerged from the cubicle balancing a teetering pile of shoes, bag, coat and towel, and headed towards the lockers where I discovered that I had left the £1 coin for the locker on the cubicle bench.  I retrieved it and, after a mere dozen attempts, found a working locker in which to ram my belongings.  I thanked the kind lady who passed me the now sodden pants I dropped on the way through (although I could not help but think that the rubber gloves were a little unnecessary) and somehow rammed the door shut on a space seemingly designed to hold nothing more than a single shoe and a tube of veruca ointment.

Pausing only to retrieve the goggles I forgot – swimming in contact lenses is not recommended without them.  Swimming without the contact lenses however, is not possible as it involves wandering fuzzily through the ladies toilet, the café and a startled zumba class before hitting the water.  You must submerge yourself quickly in public swimming pools.  Do it slowly and you are doomed.  The human body reacts badly to freezing: you cannot give it the opportunity to complain.

I am a very poor swimmer.  My preferred stroke is ‘the flounder’.  I am grateful that the water in my ears prevents me hearing the ‘tutting’ of octogenarians as they overtake me on both sides.  I put in what seemed to me to be a reasonable number of lengths – one – and climbed out happy that my health had been fully restored.  In my absence somebody had turned the changing room into a freezer.  I stood for some little time under the shower, plotting the quickest way to the locker and cubicle without suffering from hypothermia, before making a dash for it.

In the event it took me barely fifteen minutes to open the locker and retrieve my possessions, and I was ankle deep in the cubicle watching my clothes as they bobbed on the floor within seconds.  Look, I know what people do in swimming pool changing cubicles – I hope – but I have absolutely no idea of how the floor gets so wet.  I wrestled my way out of wet swimming costume and into even wetter clothes, rammed everything I could into my rucksack, before exiting the tiny melamined cell and finding myself in the sun-brushed uplands of brown porcelain tile and stainless steel wastebin.  Not even my appearance in the mirror – a very old man wearing a ginger fright-wig – could persuade me to re-open the bag in search of a hair brush.  The man at the coffee shop would just have to tolerate me.  (Although not, as it turned out, for long because – his card machine having died – he was only taking cash and as I only had a twenty and he only change for five I left without a cup of over-diluted own-brand instant beverage.  Not even my by now shattered nervous system would allow me to consider paying fifteen pounds for a coffee.)

Still, my wife was right, I really did feel better for it… until she explained that I was expected to do it all again next week.

There are many things
That I would like to know
And there are many places
That I wish to go
But everything’s depending
On the way the wind may blow…  Acquiesce – Oasis (Noel Gallagher)