Back swimming again.

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In my 30s and 40s I swam a lot. Most days I was in a pool or the sea, and I especially liked the early morning swims in both. Then I stopped quite an abruptly. On my 50th birthday I satisfied myself with swimming my habitual kilometre in 20 minutes in an almost empty pool and felt good about it. Swimming in pools had just become too difficult - overly busy with kids “supervised” by teenage parents, and hygiene standards I thought were slipping. I had completed pool and beach life guard training (oh yes) but hadn’t much opportunity to use it so swimming went to the wall and the rest of life took over. Then this morning I started up again. I had invested in pensioners’ membership of our local pool a few months ago for an annual sum of £11.90 and decided to make use of it. I get to swim from 8.30 till 9.45 every day of the week before the schools descend upon the place. It was awful. No kids thankfully, but I was the only person who heeded the instruction to shower before getting into the pool. I’d had a shower when I got up an hour earlier but I dutifully re-showered because - well, yuck. All the other people looked like they had just rolled out of bed and decided a swim was what was needed to rid them of their sweaty night of slumber and that was the soup I had to swim in. And the changing room arrangements were not great. There were male and female cubicles (all tiny) and my wife refuses to get changed in a cubicle when a man is changing on the other side of the flimsy partitioning screen which goes not up to the ceiling nor down to the floor. She wasn’t with me. She told the staff on the one occasion she was at the pool that there was nothing to stop a Peeping Tom from looking over or under the partition. All the arrangements were a bit wanting, as were the clientele except me. The pool guards were two sullen looking young men who didn’t really warm to working that early in the day and if a swimmer got into trouble I think they would have been mostly concerned about getting their beautifully styled hair wet. Anyway in spite of my grumbling I’ll give it a few more goes because I actually enjoyed the actual swim.