Some days wake you up with a bang.
This week I walked to the pool for my usual early morning swim. It’s a chance
to slowly wake up, walking down a long country road in darkness. It’s a
melancholy business, especially in autumn, trudging through drifts of dead
leaves, registering the hooting of a solitary owl as you pass the fields where old
women will later unleash their dogs.
Today though was different. Today I
was buffeted by wind, the tail end of Abigail, or Bertie or Clodagh or
something. Britain has finally got round to naming its storms—like America. Think it’s cool. I can’t keep abreast of it.
All I know I was being tossed this way and that along with trees doing some kind
of hip-hop, and waking up much faster than I wanted.
Never mind. I consoled myself with
visions of a lukewarm pool, where I could rediscover my Zen.
There is pain in getting up so
early. It demands military precision. But it’s all worth it because apart from
owls and the odd insomniac the pool is usually empty, crowded when numbers
reach four or five. You can swim through half-closed eyes imagining yourself in
your own private pool, on good days, swimming in a moon-lit lagoon.
Not today. The British Olympic
swimming team were there. I’m exaggerating, but these were serious swimmers,
thrashing the water to within an inch of its life. What the hell were they
doing there at 6.30 am? Don’t they know this is MY private pool? MY Pacific
lagoon?
I slipped in between them, all
thoughts of lagoons swept away. This was more like the North Sea in a Force Nine Gale. I
was being tossed this way and that. Great waves of chlorinated water slapped
against me. Breathing air and not water became crucially strategic, survival
hung on the moment. It was like being a
poo-stick in a tsunami.
By God, I was awake when it
finished. Never was forty lengths such hard work. Even when they’d gone it took
some time for the water to settle. I gave them plenty of time in the showers. I
needed silence and peace.
There is merit in the unexpected.
Some people swear by it. And storms, the fraility of flesh against the elements. Wonderful stuff. Yes, I get that. But it was nice to be home afterwards
with a strong cup of tea and no sugar.
2 comments:
I so rarely hear Brits complain about the weather. I was beginning to think you didn't have any.
That aside, I can hear you grumbling from here at seeing that mob flail in your pool. When you're used to a certain calming routine, you hate to see it morph into a free-for-all water park.
Hope it was a one time thing.
Hey Maria,
I don't understand what happened here, I got no notification of your comment hence the extremely late reply. And I missed a week in posting after that. Christmas. You're right though, it was unsettling but at the same time I was mocking myself and my 'cosy' routine. : )
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