A swimming pool with children in it is like being locked in a bathroom with an obtrusive fly: irritating.



Let us get a few ground rules clear.


Children in swimming pools should always be supervised by parents whose primary duty should be confined to telling the children to stay in the children’s pool, especially if they are toddling around with arms at 90% to their bodies because of the inflated bands of plastic which keep them afloat. Their secondary duty is to keep repeating the mantra, “Don’t get in the way of that nice man who is swimming lengths in the pool because he will cut you with his sharpened nails or hurt you with enthusiastic leg kicks and it will be you own fault if you start crying because you have been warned so don’t come crawling to me!”


But they never do.


No; instead they watch their little darlings gravitated towards the only part of the pool where someone is actually swimming with all the suicidal intent of feckless iron filings attracted to a powerful magnet.


No matter where you start swimming, within moments some little cartoon character will patter its way towards your line of strokes and hurl itself into your way.


The positive side of this is that it does give you an incentive to be wary when making your way up and down the pool in a straight line a small children are still capable of breaking your back as they giggle their way almost into your path.


And the parents of course, of course, naturally, say nothing.


You will notice that political liberality does not extend itself to the watery element in my case. Etiquette is etiquette; just as steam must give way to sail so flounderers and players and people larking about must keep out of my way as I make my stately and sometimes seriously expressive way up and down the pool.


The holiday has now dwindled to the weekend and a few days and my diatribes against pool abuse will dwindle just as quickly as the temperature of the water settles down into it autumnal range which will preclude my immersing myself in the chilly liquid!

My reading of Chandler continues to fascinate; especially his blatant use of earlier short stories as the basis for later novels.


The early short story “The Curtain” for example has the opening sentence: “The first time I ever saw Larry Batzek he was drunk outside Sardi’s in a secondhand Rolls-Royce.” In “The Long Good-Bye” is has become: “The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.” The second is the more powerful as ironic detachment has become more pronounced. The first is direct but unbalanced by the odd name, whereas in the second the archaism of “laid eyes on” the more ordinary name, the specific model of the Rolls-Royce and the use of a less famous place than Sardi’s seem to indicate the direction that Ian Flemming was to make his own.


Reading books electronically means that you can make notes easily and tag those lines and sentiments which appeal. You can read about dark places and shady haunts where “the people are dissipated without grace, sinful without iron” in gatherings where “furtive-eyed men slid words delicately along their cigarettes, without moving their lips” talking to women who are “handsome, but this side of beautiful.” It is all finely written and as I consume story after story I realize that I am just as addicted as virtually all the characters in the tales who seem to exist on drugs of one sort of another as they take slug after slug from the square shaped bottles when they finally remove their cigarettes from their mouths!


At least the weather is something that we have in common as the sun shines in Spain as it shines on the Spanish place names of Los Angeles and the surrounding countryside!


I have read about half of the electronic pages so far in my Chandler Omnibus but I have plenty of hardback additions to keep me happy until the start of term!