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POOLED IDEAS
I love to have a swim. I'm no water baby at 17 stone, neither am I old enough to wear a knotted hankie. I'm just glad Speedo trunks are no longer fashionable as I was fed up with twanging them on, and seeing them smile back at me in the changing room mirror. A sight that forces you to acknowledge that, if I knew I were going to look like this under fluorescent lighting, in my late forties, semi-naked, I would have taken far better care of myself. Forcing me to admit that, frankly, I only posses the body I deserve. To my delight you can wear great baggy shorts to disguise disappearing waistlines now.
This account is one, I'm sure all fun-loving parents will appreciate.
As the summer months loom and thoughts of sacrificing imperative adult objectives to become 'chief entertainment officers' for our offspring may throw us into blind panic as we try to conceive what to do with our children for 6 weeks 24/7. Especially, when kids these days have the attention span of a fruitfly and are not content with normal play, as when I was a just a 'shaver'. Like dolls-houses. I mean, tree-climbing.
They will spend three hours watching the latest Harry Potter movie with associated psychotic symptoms and Deep Vein Thrombosis happy to sit until their eyes are on springs with a lapful of popcorn and mandatory bucket of coke (that is so expensive you have to sell something first) but refuse to waste energy, riding a bike or going on a picnic in the wood. As we wrestle with an already impossible itinerary in our diaries to invent a healthy battery of events to occupy them until hell freezes over, our flaccid fledglings prefer, well, a sedentary holiday, like, video games, and…..errr, well that's it really. For the entire duration of what seems an eternity after they 'break up', the time arrives for adults to have to use their imagination for them.
Thank God for the local state run swimming pool. How can kids be bored now? Except every parent knows that such an excursion can turn out to be a minefield of terror and that hazards prevail at every turn. I don't refer to normal drowning but those unexpected and awkward scenarios that ambush you making you wish that there were only three thousand other places you would rather be.
The other day…
I decided to herd the 'knee-biters' to the pool. I arrived to hunt for a place to park the motor. This involved waiting fifteen minutes for a pensioner with attitude to vacate the only potential space. I abandoned the car tightly sandwiched between two 4x4 's the size of Green Goddesses that were left in such an askew fashion, it appears the getaway driver had to shelve a previous bank robbery, because of an urgent bowel movement. With no shoehorn available I had to pile my excited children out of the sunroof and screw myself out of the passenger door, tearing a number of ligaments I thought I never owned. All this happened, while looking for loose change that ritually escaped and ended up under my vehicle. After using a snorkel to retrieve the cash we all trooped to the pool. As I meandered with my load, I was cursing the fact I didn't have a Sherpa or, simply, a wheel-barrow to carry the tangle of towels and toiletries required.
Once inside, queuing carers from the local children's care home scowled in my direction as if I was some sort of pervert on a busman's holiday. Squeezing through crowds of people in various stages of soggy undress I chose one of the scarce, coffin sized cubicles as the 'family room', occupied by Irish travellers that had already tried to populate the planet and made the whole area smell like a flowerpot. I posted my children into one adjacent. I found my own 'closet' with a mysterious piece of lace underwear that I was sure the previous wearer would miss. Thoughtfully, I took the item and stepped back out, to place the skimpy knickers over the hand drier, hoping it might be claimed, only to bump into the frosty faced carer again who had already mentally castrated me earlier. I smiled with embarrassment. I walked back into the cubicle I had selected. Plunged into darkness I was expected to disrobe in a living space that would be better suited for an anorexic dwarf contortionist, who was already adept at taking socks off upside down. The lock was broken and I pulled down my boxer shorts with my butt soon exposed to passing Mothers covering their children's eyes for fear of them having to call Social services.
I climbed out with a bundle of attire that allowed my wallet to slip into a puddle on the floor. My credit cards will have to be signed with a smudge from now on. My next 'adventure' was to find a storage locker that hadn't been vandalised and when I did, it hungrily ate my pound coin, enlightening me as to the reason why such abuse happens in the first place.
I bumbled with my kid and her friends, acutely aware of those luckier parents that sat at home watching the soaps, to be greeted by a string of showering bathers in a tight tunnel. The only route to the pool was to get past a sea of suds and sharp elbows. Eventually, and with squeals of delight the children flung themselves into the pool while I choose to step gingerly into the waters acclimatising to the drop in temperature and pulling a face like I was about to be un-mercilessly tortured for the next hour. With my arms over my head holding what looked like an invisible rifle revealing a recent crop of boils under my left armpit. As I submerge, my parachute sized shorts fill with trapped air (not personally manufactured) but a natural phenomenon when your balls have been trapped in netting and man made fibres that have clung 'elasticated' with no room to manoeuvre producing a pocket of air in my groin area and above sea level, that made me appear to be hung like a stud bullock or sporting a hernia the size of Wisconsin.
In order to disguise my proud bulge I dived into an uninhabited patch with the grace of an epileptic sperm whale and soon surfaced with an army of Mothers trying to save their babies from a mini Tsunami and their own now bedraggled perms. As always, there is some swimming enthusiast whirring in circles endlessly. In full regalia including a nose-clip, practising for the next Olympics and muttering expletives to you (because you were eternally breaking his rhythm) and capsizing your kids with a 'butterfly' stroke or some other swimming skill.
What I hate is the chlorine. This is basically bleach and designed to make your eyes look like Neapolitans for the rest of the day and give you the sensation of rinsing you eyes in builders sand. What else defeats the object of any fun is discovering other people's ectoplasm or second hand sticking plaster floating in your 'swim' that meant some individuals who go swimming obviously don't have a bathroom at home.
I can live with all this. If only to admire very 'fit' lifeguards who are half my age and display tensile and sun-bed kissed thighs. When you hear the gentle swish of nylon shorts as she wiggles up to you only to make you to spit your bubble gum into a paper cup and then have the nerve to ask you if you have heart problems. What is that all about? Is she afraid to give me 'mouth to mouth' after seeing the size of my 'pretend' erection earlier?
So, what seventeen year old girl with a 'jiggly' chest is going to save me? I don't think so. Is there a JCB wheeled in for just such occasions? Unlikely. Anyway unless you can sit on a pair of steps humming to inaudible piped music and are able to swing and twist a sports whistle around your fingers looking disenchanted for the entire shift I can't see myself as any possible threat to sinking without a trace if it will only prevent her admiring her new nail varnish, do you?
The kids love swimming at the local pool. I would rather be suspended from a live volcano, naked and wrapped in barbed wire with two very heavy bags of shopping and a live mammal up my bottom than disembark again.
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