Although I swim every day, I have never pretended that
swimming is anything other than boring.
It is now like brushing my teeth, it is something that is necessary and
you do regularly, but is not exactly pleasurable. If I don’t have a swim, in the same way when
I (rarely) forget to brush my teeth before I go to bed, I feel that there is
something missing, something is not right.
I set myself a metric mile each day and up and down I
go for sixty lengths in my local pool and at the end of it I feel that I have
accomplished something and like ‘Doing a good turn to somebody every day’ my
duty is done.
So swimming in our community pool attached to our
house raises another problem motivation.
As our community pool is quite small, the last few meters separated form
the main pool by an underwater wall to create a ‘kiddies’ splash around area,
the actual straight swimming length is limited.
If the pool is empty I compensate by swimming in circles, but it is not
entirely satisfactory.
I have, therefore, devised an approach that combines
exercise with the law of the Wolf Cub Pack and make a virtue of necessity and
swim around picking up and discarding the rogue pine needles that settle on the
surface of the water.
I have discovered that reflection or refraction or
possibly both, mean that it is easier to see the floating needles from under
the water with a pair of goggles than searching the surface from above. I therefore must look like a swimmer
motivated by Brownian Motion as I jitter my way through the water seeking the
double refraction of the needles before they are swept out of the pool and to
the side - where I am sure that a gentle breeze will waft them back into the
water. But that is not the point: I swim
and feel that I am exercising while performing community service.
From time to time I come across insects that are
vainly wing-swimming their way through the water to a chlorinated death. When I do spy the odd wasp or beetle or fly
in their death throws, with a positively Franciscan magnanimity, I scoop them
out and deposit them on the pool side and drift away on my hoovering duties
feeling quasi angelic and somehow ‘justified’!
Today, I have to admit, I haven’t been to the pool for
a swim (for lunch, yes, but not for a swim) instead we went to the beach. We live one street away from the sea, and yet
we rarely go to the beach. I see it
every day because I usually cycle down the paseo and drive past it, but we have
suddenly become aware that it is already August and we haven’t really ‘done’
the beach. So two hours was spent beside
the waves.
And waves there certainly were. People usually assume that the Med is a quiet
and domestic body of water - and to be fair, it usually is. Sometimes, however it can be a little spirited. Today, for example, a yellow flag was flying
which indicates that swimming is not recommended. That could be for a number of reasons,
ranging from the quality of the water, through an infestation of stinging
jellyfish to adverse water conditions.
Today the water was rough. Even the profile of the beach has altered,
which certainly indicates the waves and currents have been in a terraforming and
sand-sculpting mode.
Castelldefels is a generally safe swimming spot
because although currents can be strong, they usually drag you back to shore
and along the beach. And that was true
today, with the added excitement of tumbling waves strong enough to knock you
over. Which they did. And strong enough to remove Toni’s bathing
costume - though that was in the shallows and he was able to restore decency in
the masking obscurity of sand heavy water!
Most of my time was taken up, not with swimming in the
sea, but reading on the beach. I
grabbed, at random, an unread Iain Banks novel called The Crow Road, which has (I am not surprised to find out) a place in
the Daily Telegraph’s 30 best opening lines in literature (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/30-great-opening-lines-in-literature/the-crow-road/
) I cannot say, by the way, that I agree with all the choices made there, but I
made the mistake of looking through all thirty and for many I was half inclined
to find the book in my library and start reading it again - which is always the
danger when you have a snippet of something great to tempt you!
Anyway, I have had this novel for some time and only
read the first few pages (as who cannot given the opening line!) and for some
reason had laid it aside. This is not
something that I usually do, except for Virgina Woolf’s To The Lighthouse that I did (and did with gusto) on many occasions
before I finally bit the bullet and read the whole of the damn thing. I have decided to keep the novel that I am
now gripped by purely as beach reading as that gives me an incentive to engage
in the futile and empty pastime of lazing in the sun and gives it a sort of
purpose.
Tomorrow the first of our final tranches of summer
visitors arrive and I am minded to write a series of poems suggested by
visitors, their arrival, response etc. I
have made some preparatory notes and look forward to seek where such an
enterprise takes me. The time period is
from tomorrow to the end of the month and into September and the three
‘groupings’ of visitors are very different.
I hope that this blog can also be part of the process either for ideas
or responses.
I can but try!
Though I also fear that such a task is merely
displacement activity for the work on my Spanish grammar and vocabulary. Are both possible? Should be.
Now, having written it down, it seems like a sort of
contract with the future!
A contract easily broken!
