No matter how early I make it to the pool for its opening, my
little friend with his cigarette is there before me and trips off to the pool
from the changing room to bag his accustomed end lane. It is a wise choice because the last lane is
rarely doubled swum so to speak. If you
are in it then the people who come after you choose one of the other
lanes. I had to make do with lane 4, a
good choice this morning as I had it to myself, and I was able to pace myself
against my little friend.
MLF can swim
crawl, and he swims the first length using this stroke, but his succeeding
lengths are steady breaststroke – steady, but relatively slow. My pacing him therefore is lapping him. I set myself to lap him ten times before he
leaves the pool. When he leaves the pool,
it is time for me to do my ‘endgame’: six lengths, of which the last two are,
respectively, an assessment lane as to how I think I have swum, and during the
last length I try and estimate my total distance. My aim is to complete 1,500 m and it usually takes
me about 40-45 minutes. If at the end of
my last six lengths I have completed my fifteen hundred (my smartwatch tells me
exactly) then I do one length as quickly as I can and then a leisurely length
of sedate breaststroke. I then have a
series of stretching and cool down exercises at the far end of the pool and my
last length is a high stepping walk to a final series of twenty knee bends and
out.
Usually I go to
the pool café when I have completed my swim, but today was one of the two days
when I have an early class in Catalan.
Today’s lesson was taken up with the searing film of a young girl’s
experience of growing up in Afghanistan as the school contribution to activity
associated with the Week of the Woman.
The film was
called Osama and it produced one of those experiences that leave you feeling
weak with impotent fury about how humans treat each other. Admittedly the Taliban does not have a very
positive public image and most of us feel an instinctive revulsion against the
whole ethos of what the Taliban stands for.
Like Apartheid in South Africa, the Taliban is something that can be
rejected with something approaching complacency as their attitudes towards
women are simply totally wrong. No
excuses, wrong! To say nothing of their
attitudes to culture and expression.
Because the
subject matter of the film is so appalling and so transfixing, it is difficult
to evaluate the film as a film. There
were shots of great beauty and the director was not afraid to extend some shots
and consciously dwell on squalor artistically viewed – but the story of a
family of women forced to dress the child as a boy to allow them to go outside
after the Taliban refused to let women work and be outside of their homes
without the presence of a man or boy is gripping.
There is a meeting next week in school that I may attend
which builds on the momentum from the film - but it depends on how the Catalan revision
is going! The meeting, after all, will
be in Spanish – which is not in the test!
First into the pool this morning (i.e. the day after the
opening paragraphs) and safely within the untouchable watery embrace of lane
number 5! And I kept it until the end of
my swim: alone, inviolate! And as a
bonus, during my after-swim tea (outside, though the weather was at the limit
of outsidedness) I thought of a word that I had searched for in vain last night
when I was doing more work on the memory poem: validation. And that can be used easily in phrases to
lessen its awkwardness. Each small step
towards completion is gratefully accepted.
Today a lunch date with Irene and the opportunity for more
cups of tea and word in conversation.
My revision for Catalan has taken a backward step because the
set of vocabulary cards that I wrote have disappeared and I am loath to make
another set. A clear case of
prevarication – and the exam is now five clear days away! O god! O Montreal!
And now to go upstairs and do some real Catalan work. And hope, against hope that it will result in
some sort of residence in my memory.
