Mondays and Thursdays are my days. Eight a.m. Before breakfast. The pool opens at seven for those zealous souls who like to swim before going to work. They’re gone by eight when the pool is divided into five lanes with arrows telling you which way up and which down. I like lanes. You know where you are with lanes. Let those mad fools in the fast lane work up a storm with their splashy-flashy butterfly, the sexy crawl, the somersault flip back to the beginning and off again. I’m in the slow lane. It could be a metaphor for my life.
I like lanes. You know where you are with lanes
I grew up by the sea and learnt to swim when I was six. Not in the sea but in the swimming pool where a large Scotsman in oilskins and wellies taught me how while my mother, who couldn’t swim, watched from the side. One of the selling points of the flat I bought over 20 years ago was that just across the road is one of Edinburgh’s finest Victorian swimming pools housed in a handsome sandstone brute of a building with a tower at either end, arrow slits in the basement and a great big brick chimney-stack standing 100ft proud and useless.
In the 1990s the council threatened to sell it but such was the protest that after a £5 million renovation, Glenogle Swim Centre emerged restored, its pool hall with its cast-iron columns and squiggly capitals, its wrap-around balcony, its glass skylight........