Taking tea with dolphins

Queens Drive baths was a lovely building but weirdly inefficient inside. It had no changing room, no lockers. Instead there were individual cubicles. These were small with flimsy doors, and they lined two sides of the pool. The result was, that when these individual cubicles were full, no one else could swim. As a result each swimmer was rationed (a mind-set from the war). We wore coloured wrist bands and a voice called us out when our  time was up.

Until then we went mad, random and loud, like excitable quarks. Water was magic but invariably cold. A favourite game involved the expulsion of air, which allowed us to sink like stones. Once assembled at the bottom of the pool we assembled in grave circles and drank imaginary tea, until somebody dived on top of us, or we ran out air.

Once there were dolphins – and one grim future day, someone may say that for real. But I’m talking here about dolphins in swimming pools. No one could ever accuse Liverpool City Council of not being…weird.

I thought of all this on Wednesday morning at 7.30 am, swimming one of my 45 lengths. Monmouth Leisure Centre is far more sedate, especially at 7.30 am. We swim our respective lengths in silence, but make a point of saying ‘Good morning’ or similar pleasantries to every new swimmer. This is accompanied by a chin-above-water smile. Monmouth Leisure Centre unfortunately lacks dolphins, and no one takes tea underwater. Instead we just swim, minds in free fall and thinking all manner of things. 

  It is not all plain swimming though. There are the occasional distractions. Until recently we had ‘bouncing woman’. This was a lady who bounced on the spot. She spends half the year in Monmouth, the other half in Australia. I suspect she bounces her way through like some elderly Persephone. She may be bouncing her way back to us even now.

Then there is the ‘Thresher’ though some call her ‘combined harvester’. She resembles a plump beetle and takes no prisoners. Her limbs are hard and bony, unpredictable. She decapitates the unwary with a grunt. Sometimes a ‘professional’ swimmer invades our territory. Even the ‘Thresher’ is wary of them. They have heads like cannonballs, and snarl for air as their heads briefly surface.

 I’ve probably left it too late to be a professional swimmer, but I could probably teach them a thing or two about taking tea six feet below. But I wish there were dolphins. Sharks for the 'Thresher'.