Me And Shark Boy

As mentioned in previous hhn posts, I have downgraded to using public pools, having spent the last few years as a member of a rather swanky private pool in Westminster. It was a decision based on lack of funds, rather than never being able to think of anything to say to that bloke who played Neil in The Young Ones who was the only other regular user of the swanky Westminster pool. (I was also paranoid that I would call him Neil, having read somewhere that he was really fed up of never being allowed to forget that character.)

The difference between public pools and private pools is a bit like being in the army I guess. Once you've got over the dirt and the shouting and the games of Oops I've Dropped My Soap in the showers, it is manageable - if not particularly pleasant. In another world, or life, or when someone buys the film rights to hhn, I will have a private pool all to myself. Right now it is me and the rest of the world, fighting for our little bit of space at public pools.

Anyway, pool side at the public pool yesterday, I saw this kid who immediately made me feel nervous. I couldn't figure out why, until he started swimming and I remembered that I had seen him before and that he was technically the worst swimmer on earth. He moves up and down the pool like a shell-less turtle that had had a bad stroke, arms and legs all over the place, one moment trying crawl, the next some sort of breaststroke which looks like he has been shot in the chest, and then he flips over into his take on back stroke which involves him using his chin rather than his arms or his legs to propel himself forwards (or backwards). After about a third of a length of this 'swimming', he needs to take a rest, and does a few shallow dives, like a bird in a bird bath, all spluttering and shaking of his arms/wings. Truely mesmerising stuff, impossible not to marvel at a bloke so far away from the actual art of swimming thinking he is actually swimming.

So I started my swimming, but half way through my fourth or fifth length - and after a slight collision with a bull dyke who obviously wanted to make a point about women being as strong as men and was using me as Exhibit A - I got to thinking about my swimming, and whether or not people were watching me like I had been watching Shark Boy floundering around, getting in the way, and generally failing to swim. Which made me really self-conscious, which was the begining of the end. Because swimming is like being in a plane or playing Playstation games. The minute you actually start thinking about it, you are screwed. It becomes a completely confusing and unlikely thing to be doing.

I started swimming late. I didn't learn until I was about seven, when me and a bunch of kids in my class at school where taken to a local pool, instructed (for no reason I have ever figured out) to put on pyjamas, and then told to swim from one end of the pool to the other. Those of us who didn't make it, which included me, were correctly judged to be unable to swim. (There was some other exercise involving a brick covered in black rubber, but that was only for the kids who had made it to the other end of the pool.)

I left it for a while after that, having had a few lessons and managing to convince someone that I should get some sort of badge to get sewn on my swimming trunks to prove that I could make it to the edge of a pool if I ever fell in - pyjamaed or otherwise. My first ever girlfriend told me she swam for the Swiss junior team, so there was never any question of me going to embarass myself in front of her at a pool. (Actually, she turned out to be a pathalogical liar, so maybe she didn't swim for Switzerland. She was Swiss though. I saw her passport.) And here and there over the coming years, I'd reluctantly hang around in the shallow end of pools while other people did their crawl and back stroke and butterfly and stuff. There didn't seem any need to continue the swim thang. I was happy watching other people, and maybe doing the odd length of breaststroke or crazed, breathless crawl which probably looked a little like what Shark Boy gets up to.

And then about 10 years ago I slipped a disk in my back, and was told that I should take up swimming, which I did, with some trepidation. Which turned into a complete addiction. I can't get enough of it. When I am feeling sad, happy, old, young, fat, thin, rich, poor, bald or hairy, the one thing that really really relaxes me is a swim. So I guess I shouldn't be so hard on Shark Boy. Maybe his shambolic, crazed water dancing is as relaxing for him as mine is for me. As long as we don't think about it too much, I guess the two if us are getting away with it.