It's A Race!

There was a time when I religiously went for a swim most lunch times, then again I was healthier then, less blubber around the midriff. There was the occasional thrill of catching a glimpse of someone under 30 and remotely attractive, someone perfecting the breaststroke, a metre ahead of me. Instead, I had to be content with a herd of seventy year olds furiously working towards extending their shelf life and putting me to shame. In time I began to recognise the faces, there was an occasional nod of acknowledgement, responding sometimes to banal chat like ‘oh, the water’s really cold today, you don’t know what’s gonna freeze off next’, I would always respond with ‘yep’, weary about getting into anything more complicated though would hold back from quipping ‘well its cold every fucking day’.

Sadly I would recognise them by their boils, their burns and their moles and other degenerative growths. I’d recognise others by their scar tissue and others just from their repulsive body odour. Life really was that grim, sharing chlorine-tainted water with incontinent 70 year olds, fuck knows what I may have swallowed in that time when I was competing with senility in the pool.

I must also explain that my swimming technique was then quite hopeless as it is now. I push off spectacularly underwater and then launch into a breathtaking breaststroke that generates enough energy to power under soil heating for Wembley Stadium but still it takes me almost a minute to complete a 25 metre journey. By the time I’ve completed a length my then geriatric competitors would be on their next length and I would be playing catch up, and catch up would involve chasing unsightly cellulite and pubic hair that was last trimmed in 1962, still I would persevere.