I’ve started swimming.
I don’t mean just now, obviously. I’m not sitting with my laptop in the shallow end tapping away. But recently, I started swimming.
Again.
I've only started swimming once before, just before covid. But I didn't really go often enough to truly call it starting. It was more like - every now and then, I would go swimming. Then when the plague hit, with everything closing down, all that half-hearted 'starting' and 'going' very quickly turned into very dedicated stopping.
On occasion, I guess I might claim that I went swimming. You know: the odd splish-splash on holiday or messing about with my sons.
But it’s not the same as starting swimming. Starting, to me at least, implies the undertaking of a routine. Going once is not a routine. Going once is going once. It doesn’t count as ‘starting’. Starting is going more regularly. That’s me. That’s what I’m doing. I’ve started swimming.
And since starting, I’ve been six times. I’ve swum a total of 344 lengths during that time. That’s just short of 6 miles. It’s equivalent to the distance from my front door to the edges of city centre Manchester. With the way the trains have been recently, swimming to Manchester would only take a little bit longer than by train. And I’d only get a little bit more wet.
Damn, I can’t tell you how much the water has missed me. It makes sense though. We’re 60-ish percent water, give or take the odd sneeze or trip to the bathroom. Some say it’s more. Much more. Some say we’re 99% water. Those people, who say that, are wrong.
Apparently 99% of our molecules are water molecules, but they don’t take up as much space. So making that claim is just the talk of crazy people.
I mean, it’s like saying because you have a larder full of boxes of Walkers Meaty Multipacks, your house is more crisp than brick!
Anyway, one thing I think we can all agree on is that the water in the pool is 100% water.
OK, and probably a bit of wee.
Depending on whether the schools have already been in that day.
But you know what? With all the chlorine, I don’t let it bother me.
I'm a dolphin, and dolphins aren't bothered about a bit of wee in the water.
To speed things up, I always go to the swimming baths with my swimming shorts under my jeans. I’m not sure this saves me more than a minute in the ‘getting ready’ timings, but I like to be in the water as soon as I can. I don’t like hanging around.
You see, when I’m waiting to go into the water, waiting for the class of peeing school kids to finish, all the other adults hanging around for the changeover look like they’re people about to have a swim. I on the other hand, tend to feel more like a man wandering about in his boxer shorts. I feel like an imposter until I’m actually in the water.
I stuff all my belongings into a locker, pop a pound coin in the slot, lock the locker and retrieve my key. Then I remember that it would be sensible to have my towel ready to go, outside my bag, rather than, all wet, having to fish it out. So I unlock the locker.
I set my towel on top of my bag, retrieve my pound coin again, re-insert it in the slot, lock it up and take out my key. Then I remember I brought goggles didn’t I and they’re zipped away in my bag too! So I unlock the locker, get the goggles, retrieve the pound coin, re-insert the coin back in its slot and relock the locker and take out the key.
Now, I’m ready.
Except I can’t get the plastic strap for the locker key to fasten around my wrist. It’s happy to be either so loose it will fall off, or so snug it stops my blood flow, but somewhere in the middle proves to be a lot more difficult to achieve. I glance around to see how everyone else is coping with this impossible conundrum.
Right. They’re all fine. No one but me is conundruming. Typical. Now I feel even more uncomfortable.
I'm not sure exactly when I started muttering to myself, but suddenly I realise I am. Muttering to myself like a man who should have security called on him. Do swimming pools have security?
Eventually, the clasp clasps. I pop the key itself in its little sheath thing on the strap and I’m ready to go. The key flops out of its plastic sheath. I pop it back in. It pops back out. What the hell is wrong with this thing?! There is no way to make it stay in there. Nothing. So my choices are, I can either swim with a flappy key or get all my stuff and put it in another locker.
I'm about to lose my mind when I accidentally catch someone’s eye. It's only a glance, but I can tell they think I’m an idiot.
I stop fiddling with my key strap. I choose to be flappy.
I'll be a little less aerodynamic than I’d have wished for, but I try to focus on the positives. I’m about to swim! I quarter turn to the man next to me, who saw my struggles, and I’m about to do that terribly British thing of pointing out my failings, thus bringing them out into the open before he can talk to someone else about them behind my back.
But that’s when I notice his key.
It’s flappy, sure, but it’s on a piece of wide rubber band, not a plastic Rubik’s cube of a strap. He’s literally just put his hand through the loop and he’s good to go. Where the hell did he get that? I glance at the lockers.
Shit.
98% of them have a rubber band like his does.
I am literally the only muppet using the ones with the key strap malarkey thing! All the other almost-swimmers are aware I’m a newbie. Damn them and their rubbery ways.
It’s too late to change things now – the urinating brigade are being corralled by their teachers – so I head to the water’s edge.
The pool isn’t too busy.
There are three choices when lane swimming. There’s slow, medium and fast. For reasons no one knows, the fast section is in the middle of the other two, and is only two single lanes. Either side, the slowies and the middlers get three lanes each and an instruction to swim clockwise. There’s a diagram of clockwise for those unable to tell the time.
I drop into the water with majestic grace and marvel at how warm it is. I immediately force from my mind exactly why it might be so warm, wait for a gap in the traffic, push off from the wall and there I go – swimming.
When you lane swim, it’s very much about exercise. We all know from our childhoods that swimming is never, ever supposed to be fun – no running, no diving, no shouting, no bombing etc.
For clarity, up here, if one wants to have ‘fun’ in water, there are but two choices. Firstly, you can leave your house. It’s nearly always raining, so anything you do out there, fun or otherwise, is undertaken in at least ankle-deep water.
There's a certain type of kid you see in the North. They run in packs of three or four. Never more. It’s probably something to do with local council rulings on ‘gathering’. Or the ankle tags I assume they’re all wearing.
They play out in the rain all the time. They don’t care.
I wonder if they're feral?
Or maybe they're just reincarnations of me and my mates when we were the same age?
The second way to have fun in water is to go to the ‘leisure pool’, a short barefoot walk from the proper pool where I am motoring through the water like the dolphin I am. This other pool has slides and music and ramps etc. You have to pass it on the way to this pool. Today it contained about forty older ladies doing some sort of exercise that involved standing absolutely still, holding floats like bendy yellow drainpipes. I’d like to have understood what was going on there – but staring at ladies in the water is frowned upon here. And, to be fair, everywhere else as well.
When I swim lengths, I repeat the number of the length I’m on with every stroke. In my head. Knowing how many I’ve done is very important to me. I keep a note of it. I like to have a target to equal or beat. But as well as the counting: one-one-one-one etc. as I swim, I also take a moment to think about me, my life, at the age I was on the number of each length. The first length I consider my life aged one. The second, aged two. You get the idea?
It's a little weird. But I'm the one in the water, so shush.
The first couple of lengths are understandably vague, I don’t remember much about my first two years as a baby dolphin. But I imagine my parents carrying me, swaddling me, getting to know me.
In no time I’m at primary school, then secondary. It takes about 90 seconds to complete sixth form and in another couple of minutes I’m out of education, a degree in my hand, and for the first time in my life, expected to fend for myself.
Lengths 20-30 are a blur of acting, set building, living in Wales, discovering snakebite and black and being part of a theatre company with whom I performed 40 plays, musicals and cabarets.
The end of my twenties are a little slow. Not in the real world – in the pool! A man who thinks himself too good for the slow section is, in fact, hideously incorrect. He’s doing all the swimming actions as they should be done. But he’s hardly moving in the water. Making progress at the speed I might have in my 20s, awash with snakebite and black, I glance to the pool bottom, just in case he’s dragging an anchor behind him. He isn’t. He’s just a really, really, really slow swimmer.
I’m not!
I power past him like the lead dolphin in the pod and head to London, at 30. During these next ten lengths I become a Dad, work backstage in West End theatre, and lap Capt. Invisible-Anchor Man, once again. The first time I passed him I was puzzled. This time I’m getting annoyed.
Can’t he see he’s in the wrong part of the pool? Can’t he see he’s holding me back? A dolphin needs to swim with other dolphins not an old man made of breeze blocks.
A woman half my age glides past me and glances at me as if I'm holding her up! Bloody cheek. Kids today and all that. No respect.
I let her overtake me.
(‘Let her’ might be slightly overstating things.)
Not all my 40s were the happiest times in my life. I tend to let those years wash over me and let historical me get on with all the bad choices that, although pretty rubbish at the time, have ultimately ended up making me, me.
That’s when I notice there’s music playing in this pool too. Not just in the fun, static ladies with yellow drainpipes pool. It can't have been playing all this time, can it? I mean, I've swum 40-odd lengths, I'm nearly middle aged!
Between strokes, it takes a moment to pick out exactly what I’m listening to.
It's pretty dreary...
Oh, it's Coldplay.
That’s an odd choice. It’s certainly not fun music like the ladies with the yellow floats were listening to, while they practiced standing.
(How fit is anyone getting by standing? It's not the way of the dolphin! Not least because of the lack of legs. Oh, unless they were deeply engrossed in a seniors game of musical statues? That must be it. That would explain a lot.)
I wonder if there are guidelines on the most appropriate swimming music? Probably have to wait a long time before they play Drowning Man by U2. Or the theme from Jaws.
On my 49th length I meet Sarah. Not here in the pool, she’s on the other side of the world, how would that work? It makes me smile. It always makes me smile. And it makes the next few lengths fly by.
The 56th is the oddest length. Because it represents a year yet to come. What will it contain? I don’t dream into the year’s possibilities, I just put my head down, knowing my target of 60 is almost upon me.
At 59 I get cramp. Just in one foot. Not bad, but it turns my foot into a house brick. Swimming with a house brick for a foot is not easy. Makes me ever so slightly guilty about Anchor Man. I have to slow considerably.
Which is when I notice a couple have joined us. He’s in front of his partner. She's swimming about a foot behind him as though trying to mount him. We all know from our childhoods that ‘petting’ is disallowed at the baths!
It’s the reason I have never brought a litter of kittens into a leisure centre! (I, thank you...)
But this couple are not engaged in petting of any kind. They’re talking. Swimming and talking? That makes no sense. The chap is younger than me, athletically built, which is all the inspiration I need to finish strong. I’m not letting this whipper-snapper overtake me! I kick off the wall like an Olympian going for gold. And sure enough he and his chatty friend do not overtake me as drag my club footed cramp towards the final milestone.
I show no weakness. I touch the wall. I'm done. 60 lengths.
Because they are there, I use the steps at the side of pool to climb out of the shallow end. Which, for reasons that must have been explained in a physics lesson I missed, makes my body feel like I’m piggy-backing that couple out with me at the same time.
Is it because the pool has become a hideous vortex of extreme gravitational pull? Or maybe I am now solid swimming muscle, which, as we all know, is significantly heavier than swimming blubber. Except in seals, who constantly defy the rules of physics. Or could it simply be that we dolphins are not supposed to exit the water via the steps?
Getting the key strap thing off is no easier than getting it on. It’s a 30 second walk to my locker but I reach it with the key still firmly round my wrist. Which means I have to stand there, now in soaking wet swimming underwear, trying to undertake an action which makes no logical sense whatsoever! You should push the thing and the other thing should be clear of the stoppy things and then the thing should come off. It’s not rocket science – but it’s much more complicated!
I reach the point where either I’m going to have to cut my hand off to access my towel or, worse, some twenty-two year old primary teacher is going to come over and ask if I need help. But, as so often happens, I repeat the exact same action and this time the key strap opens. I know it’s just badly designed plastic, but I swear I can hear it sniggering.
In my changing cubicle it occurs to me how much longer it takes to get dry and dressed at the swimming pool than in your own bathroom. Why is that? Granted, I don’t put my clothes for the day in a rucksack before taking my normal daily shower. Nor do I have to find somewhere to put the locker pound coin so I neither lose it nor get chlorine all over everything by putting it straight in my wallet at the bottom of my bag.
Nor, in your own bathroom, do you have consider every surface filthy with the grub of the grubby person who last got changed in there. One’s own grubbiness is much more preferable to a stranger’s. Then again, as I’m getting dressed in the exact same cubicle I got undressed in, the last grubby person in here was me! Hurrah!
Suddenly I’m aware of the latest song playing in the pool area. It’s Rhythm Is A Dancer by SNAP! I’ve heard the song a hundred times over the years, but this is the only time I’ve thought:
‘Rhythm is a Dancer? No it isn’t.’
What absolute nonsense.
'Rhythm Is A Dancer' is as meaningless as singing... 'Hatstand Is A Deckchair'.
I’ve just been swimming, like a dolphin, suffered key-strap rage and been made to feel (TWICE, might I add) that I’m wandering around amongst strangers, wearing nothing but my pants – and now I have to listen to this old tosh! It's everything that's wrong with the world!
I had no idea swimming could make a person so cross. Who knew?
I’m just squeezing my remaining ‘not quite dry foot’ into my ‘my no longer dry sock’ when the song gets to the worst lyric ever written. I’d forgotten it:
I’m serious as cancer, when I say rhythm is a dancer.
Dear God.
As I walk out into the cool February air, I can’t stop thinking about those ridiculous words. What garbage.
The song would be much better with my alternative lyrics:
I’m serious as an ingrowing hair, when I say hatstand is a deckchair.
I like that – it’s the cherry on the top of a splendid morning. Not only have I swum 60 dolphin-like lengths, I’ve also improved 90s dance music.
And how many of us can said we’ve done that on a Tuesday before lunch?
And so, leaving a cloud of chlorine in my wake, like a dolphin swimming away from its own pee in the ocean, I go in search of coffee.
What a glorious morning.
Hatstand is a deckchair, and the crisp house will stay with me. Brilliant, as always.
Oh wow! I loved this! Definitely describes my days at the swimming baths in days gone by - apart from the 60 lengths! 🤣 I haven't been swimming for years but I feel I must get back into it - become a trainee dolphin!! Thank you for starting my week off with a chuckle and the odd belly laugh Paul! 😊 Sue
Wow, is that your swimming baths? Looks more like something out of the sumptuous buildings of Roman Times. Loved this very humorous account, Paul. I experienced the intrepidation and dubious feelings as you took the plunge (no pun intended). I think it's great that you went and I hope you have other pleasurable dips. Silvia (Hart)
Thank you for making me laugh 😂 I do lane swimming too and can really relate! I leave my locker key by the wall by the poolside and just hope no one nicks it!!!
Brilliant, so funny, well done Dolphin 🐬😀