There is water in the pool!
By itself, that opening sentence reads more like a truism than an observation – a pool, self-evidently must have water. But we are talking of my local swimming pool that has been drained and closed for its annual maintenance period, and I have been ‘forced’ to go to the gym. Which I hate.
As my swim is an early morning one, I felt that my transfer to the gym for the period of exile had to be at the same time. I am, in some things, a creature of habit and I know that if I break routine then I am quite capable of dismissing that particular activity from my life with consummate ease. So, hate it or not, I traipse to the gym at 6.30 am and do my rounds of the hated machines.
I have established a Via dolorosa Machinarum with each of the instruments of torture being an individual statio on my particular Camino Doloroso de las MÃ quinas. I start with the rowing machine – we only have one, so I go there first to ensure that it is done and dusted before the ‘masses” arrive for their pre-work rituals. I do 1,000 m of brisk rowing and stop.
My second statio is the static bike on which I do 30 minutes of pedalling at level 3 or 4 and can read from my phone via Kindle to pass the time.
It is from the vantage point of the static bike that I can gaze through the large windows on the side walls of the gym into the parallel building that houses the pool. As I start my ‘exercise’ early it is not yet light and the pool is in the sort of gloom that I feel matches my mood as I complete my go-nowhere exercise. And where I can also make out (just) the echoing emptiness of an empty space where the water should be.
It wasn’t so much direct observation that alerted me to something positive, but rather the rippling reflections of dim light being caught in the windows. Ripples mean water and the only place to hold enough water to create ripples like those was in the pool itself.
I looked more closely and noticed that there did appear to be a different quality of obscurity underneath the bottommost rung of the metallic ladder at the end of the pool. And an even closer look discerned what could only be water!
I have long learned to treat Spanish estimates of “this will be ready by . . .” as anything more than pious well-meaning, but essentially empty platitudes: and nothing says a pool is not ready for use than it being empty of the one element that makes it a pool. So, the slow, but visible element rippling gently, is, to put it mildly, encouraging.
I am further encouraged by the necessity of getting the pool up and running for the contracts with the various schools in the immediate neighbourhood that have to be fulfilled. Money speaks. And speaks loudly.
I will look with an evaluating eye at the water level tomorrow as I peddle nowhere, and can afford myself the luxury of assuming that if it is higher than it was yesterday then my pedalling is (metaphorically) getting me further towards the reopening of the pool.
And to those of my fellow sufferers in the circle of hell that Dante would have created if he had known that such places like gyms with Los instrumentos del tormento had existed (with willing participants!) who smile at me and say, “After a couple of weeks you will be converted and will come here rather than the pool!” – my only response is, “Watch me! I am a proud heretic and will burn rather than stay a second beyond the opening of the pool!”
