Eddy Currents

Cold Calling

It is the last week of the swimming term and I have that Dickension affliction, chilblains. Those apparently in the medical know recommend that to avoid developing painful, itchy, swollen toes, you should never, ever allow your feet to get cold. Right. It seems I am in the wrong business. Not that teaching is entirely to blame; reckon that standing on muddy football pitches, week-in, week-out doesn't help. Nor does sitting around a covered market blowing into the fingerless-gloved hands and making smoke-rings with any excess breath. I'd wear the spraunzty fur-lined boots that Jon got me two years ago but I can't feel the pedals when I drive in them, the sensation being not unlike having a bucket of warm custard instead of an accelerator, and my Derbyshire christened walking boots are brilliant for slithering down the peaks but remain somewhat unfleet-footed when I'm dashing up Lordship Lane to make the school pick-up.

Staying warm in winter is the swimming teacher's supreme challenge. And you thought it was teaching little Dudley how to do frontcrawl .. Above everything, us waterborn instructors obsess about how cold we are. Even with shorty wetsuits and rash vests, our podgy purple pins poking out and hunched shoulders gives the game away. We don't clap for attention because we are officious, you know. I also break all the HSE and management rules by parking a thermos of tea under the 'no eating or drinking' sign to cuddle when the shivering gets too violent, and have been known to threaten four year olds with a length of butterfly for knocking over my cup.  

Worse is the changing afterwards. You either get privacy in the utterly freezing, unheated and undraughtproofed disabled changing facility  - well, they don't need to keep bits that don't work warm, do they..? But they can get their clothes off in the shower without the world watching. Wouldn't want to offend the world afterall.. Or, you stay warmer in the communal changing rooms but can only have a shower with wetsuit firmly on, unless you want all the dads poolside to see just how purple the rest of you can be. Mindyou, some small, freshly rubbed down and dressed sweetie usually opens the door to the outside world just as I peel my costume down and the people who bought the new flats across the way get more view from their balcony than they were promised in the estate agent's specs.

It is even colder in the private school pool I teach in. At least the water in the state sector is maintained at an even 'tepid'. In the independent shallows, where a profit is required, they leave the cold tap on. Still, stops 'em going soft, eh!

The coldest and wettest I have ever been was in the 80s at the last march for the miners in London; in a deluge no doubt ordered by Thatcher, we trudged down Pall Mall and into Hyde Park, the rain disguising our tears. Later, walking home exhausted and sodden, I stumbled off a kerb in somewhere posh like Fitzrovia, causing a woman in a Volvo estate to brake sharply. Behind her, chatting into his brick of a mobile phone, a classic 80s yuppie in his nice warm, dry Porsche went smack straight into her boot. His look of exasperated disbelief mangled with utter disgust was worth every chilblain that grew on every toe that day.

So, I get back from my classes so tired and chilled that I can't speak and I do the second thing that those in the medical know recommend avoiding: expose the afflicted extremeties to sudden heat. Well wouldn't you? I run a bath, Jon makes me more sweet tea and I shudder as I submerge myself all the way under the surface. And I lie there for a long time...

At The Hop With Neil.

I renewed my lifesaver’s certificate last Friday, which involved a full day of imagining all the ways your swimmers could die. What larks. Worse, once we’d been scared witless, we had go to rescue them all. With CPR and head splints and bear hugs and bear splints. We go through this every two years and you’ll be pleased to know that the stuff we learn and practise, remains in our brain for about.. ooh.. three weeks, before we become a headless chickens once more. That it stays in our chlorine shrivelled heads for that long is a miracle, in no small part due to our trainer, a stringy patient bloke called Mark.

Then, you don’t see your Rescue Test teacher from two years to the next, and within a weekend you are standing next to him in the pouring rain queuing for Thai curry at the Hop Farm Festival in Kent. How weird is that. And how different we look in our civvies.

There was a ton of queuing going down at Vince Power’s ethically bearable Neil Young Fest, but fabulously, it was all at the kind of food stall you’d find on the front at Hunstanton or, under the arches at Brixton market. Being a total loser, the last event like this I attended was a couple of years ago to see Madness at the Lokereenfest in a Flemish chunk of Belgium of countryside which was branded to within an inch of its redneck life and while the only brown faces visible were those of the nutty boys on the stage, the field was a riot of mega global sponsorship with phone companies and drinks logos all competing fluorescently behind balloons and banners and tarty bints in skimpies, male and female. Here, the Hop Farm sizzled in a veil of rain as old fashioned smelly burgers and fried onion vans rubbed shoulders with headshop tents flogging rafts of legal highs and Kath Kidston style flowery enterprises, all pinnyed up and cheerful, offering the healthy alternative to liquid animal fat in a bun. It was all so low-rise and well, un-balloony.

And that went for the backstage area too; me and Melony – for it was she – thanks to the kindness of a loyal Bookseller Crow outpatient, had passes to the artists’ bar and, ergo, lavs. Aside from some extra bogroll and no holes in the floor, the area was refreshingly unstarry, with no Paula Pryke floral extravaganzas or marquee to marquee sponsored hospitality. Yes, the press were kept away from the creatives and, suspiciously, their bit looked comfier than ours, but it was all reassuringly on message and low-key.

Better still, the famous were forced to rub proverbials with the great unwashed in the arena as there was no VIP enclosure to keep the pristine rich and successful separate from the riff-raff in navy blue gortex. And when they’d done clapping along to the Supergrass refrain, we are young, we are free, they had to queue to get back into the safe chilly bar back with their friends.

The performances were pleasantly measured too. Perhaps it was an anticipatory response to the maestro headlining but the nice plain line-up, with no frills, save a silly hat from Rufus Wainwright, sort of turned the volume up gently. The atmosphere was cuddly in the moshpit (for Rufus? Imagine!) as opposed to heated and this, me and Melony agreed, was down to the demographic. For the crowd was the safest, sensiblist, most studious bunch of olive crunchers this side of Glynde. The place was a sea of green shooting chairs full of sixty-somethings in cowboy hats and kagoules, balancing plastic wine goblets on their Independents on Sundays. Occasionally, a thirty year old yoof disguised as a chav would stagger round the picnic blankets cupping his gonads and pretending to be pissed but as soon as he got out of earshot to the front of the falafel & pitta queue, he let go of his balls and the estuary accent and asked for extra hummous, please.

Me and Melony played a game of Hop Farm Cricket: 2 runs for recognising someone, 4 for somebody you knew to talk to, a bye for an over heard reference to East Dulwich and a wide for someone you hate, and I ended up with a fuckload of runs. And yes, it even went over the boundary rope when I saw a small boy walking behind a small man, calling Dad! Dad! And Bob Mortimer turned round.

Don’t get me wrong, I totally enjoyed the pleasant and organised atmosphere: there was a distinct lack of emaciated annoying smackheads wobbling about; there was barely a curl of fag smoke, let alone good old-fashioned Mary Jane, and the patchouli dipped flower children of yesteryear were replaced by hoards of urchins from Hennes and Moritz scavenging for papercups. At one point I witnessed two lads up to no good – they had pinched the recycling man’s wheelbarrow and were attempting a high-speed chase, but the maze of pop-up pup tents meant the guy in an unlogo-ed day-glo donkey jacket soon caught up and tipped them out petulantly. I didn’t see a single rozzer all day.

Not that there weren’t moments when the desire for recklessness was overwhelming and I wanted Bobbie Gillespie to go naked, wave his winkle and actually persuade the crowd to get their rocks off. I mean, they are called Primal Scream for god’s sake: I needed anguish and passion and blood and guts. The Primals could have squashed  their bums collectively against the cameraman’s lens and provided us with an enormous pressed ham for the big screen on either side of the stage, but I doubt the woman beside us would have looked up from her paperback. Instead, it was like the Carter’s Steam Fair of festivals. No simmering sexuality hanging nonchalently off the sparking pole on the back of the dodgem, but some lovely paintwork on the swingboats.

Mindyou, there I was taking the rise out of the wrinklies in their gale battered Peter Storms trying to suck out a strawberry vodka jelly from a little pot (can you think of a worse way to consume alcohol?), when I stood up to welcome the star of the show on stage, I didn’t half feel stiff.

Neil Young soon sorted the the dilettantes from the die-hards. Two thirds into his relentless set, the pilots left to catch their planes back to the mock Tudors in Thames Ditton. I’m glad he didn’t play Southern Man. It would have seemed like too much of a commercial gesture. Instead, the number before the encore was vast, and long and totally intoxicating and those that had come for a colour supplement version of Woodstock, simply didn’t have the legs. The effect of this authentic behemoth wildman, both lost in and in command of his sound, magnified by the screens, was of an ogre roaming the cloudy top of the beanstalk, whilst we tapped and swayed in our mediaeval village below.
 

Afterwards, the surge to the gates was an orderly nylon swish. The bit where I truly wished that I was a barefoot twenty year old again again, was in the effing fiasco of actually getting away. In the distance I spied Mark the Lifesaver buying a hotdog from a lone ice-cream van while we were gridlocked in our VW Transporters and 4x4s, Kas and, in my case, a third hand Squashed Tomato, our engines and expletives polluting the planet for the next three hours it took to get out of the field. In the old days, I would have given a finger to the flock of sheep piling out of the pen. I would have stuffed work and Monday morning and hunkered down under a coat on the back seat, swigging Jack Daniels and kipping through the chaos. But as a fully-paid up welly-wearing square and grown-up, I just wanted my bed. And Neil? I bet he went back on his horse….

Languid

Wednesday before half term and my last swimming class is a no-show. Perhaps ‘class’ is an exaggeration as it seems to imply numerous willing pupils bobbing up and down while I take a sodden (I said sodden, not sodding) register. However, what it lacks in quantity, my final lesson makes up in exuberance; two speckled blond brothers, small, slippery and hellbent on splashing nine shades of aquamarine out of eachother. So much so that, though we have tried, nobody else can or wants to be, taught alongside them. It simply isn’t possible; their mischievous influence irresistible, the minute someone joins them in the water, it is like an air crash and teaching a stroke becomes a battle to have anybody above water for long enough to listen. Let alone, not drown.

I don’t hate ‘em but they are gorgeous little lads who just give me a very hard time and if I could get out of teaching them, I would. It would be different if the scratchy towel of convention could be thrown in as it were, along with the scrutiny of my boss (whose blood pressure rises so rapidly in their presence, he resembles a tumbler of Ribena being poured), the disapproval of other parents watching from the side (it is far worse than parallel parking), ASA directives on lesson planning and correct practice, child protection and health and safety, and all other notions of organisational teaching. Then, I could just chuck ‘em about in the water, have a laugh and get out. Which is all they bloody want anyway.

Meanwhile, their separated parents take it in turns to bring them and my cause isn’t helped by the dad’s inability to get them into the water on time. Ever. Old fashioned chillum types, she with smoke grey hair and he with an Afghan style Cornish pasty hat (it is) and neither wearing socks with their espadrilles, even in the absolute freezing armpit of winter, their cheering hippy sensibility, though endearing in the lit faces of their lovely boys, doesn’t stretch to communication. Thus, she asks me every other week if he managed to arrive for the start of the thing the previous week and I, cringing and exhausted from trying to get her sons to conform for long enough to learn anything, have to tell on him.

So, when they fail to show, my relief is manifest in some hard drilled lengths while the lifeguard plods about in the warm air, gathering up the floats in a slow, wafty fashion (word of warning: lifeguards simply aren’t paid enough to move fast). Seven minutes before closing time, I haul myself out of the water, take a meditative swig of cold tea from my thermos cup (the rules about no food or drink on the poolside are blatantly flaunted in my case - ah, the rebel in me - though I stick to those regarding bombing, smoking and petting) and peel off my wet suit. And their little faces plop round the changing room door. Followed by the face of the father who already knows he is in a shedload of trouble from the ex-missus.

One of the boys, however, isn’t in his trunks and his eyes are all red.

“I had a real fight to get them out of the house,” the dad shook his head. “I think only one will go in.”

I said: “I’m no going to even attempt a lesson now. Let him get wet. He can play.” I liberated a float and some sinkers and a hoop from the lifeguard’s labours and dangled my legs over the side to finish my tea.

The skinny boy looked tiny, alone in the corner of the pool, under the pace clock. With no sibling to hold under, or splash incessantly, he seemed a bit baffled. He turned a slow somersault, experimenting with the sensation, then dived down to pick up the sinkers. His brother watched, the occasional sob shuddering still, and his dad shoe-gazed. Sorry, toe-gazed. Casting around, the boy shot a couple of hoops and then swam to the deep end. Then, to my quiet satisfaction, he did a length of carefully measured front crawl, breathing properly all the way and remembering to kick quickly, unlike much of the male of the species. His dad looked up and caught my eye.

Amazingly, the boy snipped a second length, this time of breaststroke, digging down and exhaling on every pull. Then, he turned over and completed a beautiful, languid length of backcrawl with his slender arms perfectly timed as they ticked through the untroubled surface, his long hair dressing the little bow wave.

“That – was – fan – tastic!” I yell and the little bastard gave me such a knowing, twinkly triumphant grin. “Now get out..” I growl, adding a wink. And I thought I’d  been wasting everybody’s time for weeks.

Squashed Tomato

As if my luck needed livening up, some daft old codger pulled out on me just as I was innocently driving to work. No mirror. No signal. One lurching manoeuvre. He took out my headlight as he slammed into my port side. Livid as a tub of bees, I found myself bashing my head on the steering wheel deliberately, while the fella was sat behind the wheel of his Zetec blinking. “Idiot! Bloody, bloody, bloody, bloody…”

Eventually, I could get out of the car – its nickname, The Squashed Tomato, now possessing the kind of irony that makes me want to have it towed instantly to a breaker’s yard – without my mouth drilled into a howling maw, but the silly bugger was still sat there opening and closing his eyes.

Insurance? I demanded, snapping open my hand. Like that was going to happen. The old bloke wearily climbed out and replied: “I know a man who’ll fix it..”

Later, in nursery, after I’d bitten off the heads off several small children, my line-manager (for it was she), asked if I thought I might be in shock. Shock? Shock? I am in fury, I reply. Until, of course, I hide in the store cupboard (minus two degrees c, a ton of play equipment and the smell of leaking fruit – the scheme is complicated by the edict that age 3 and 4s are only entitled to half a piece each..) and phone Jon. Who gets shouty and says I drive too fast and, whatd’youmeanyoudidn’tgethisinsurance? Then I crumple and have to go and compose myself in the teacher’s lav. Well, not quite ‘in’ it. I wasn’t gonna beat myself up that badly.

Later still, His Nibs calms considerably and puts the phone down having spoken to the fella. “He knows a man who’ll fix it,” he says.

On the Monday I drive the circus down by Rye Lane, around the contours of the old lido (you can still see a swimming pool blue fountain with its moulded luxuriant cascade amidst the shrubs and rats), to meet my nemesis as instructed. Why I am taking orders from him, I know not, but he says I’ll never be able to find the garage he uses without him leading me there. However, our cars did not coincide (!) and I was back on the blower to take my next command kidnap style, my confidence wavering betwixt tarmac level and exhaust pipe. His missus said: “He’s been driving’ round and round and he never saw you. You see, it wasn’t a very clever place to meet..”

On the Wednesday, having demanded a real live address, I track down ‘Blessed Autos’ under the arches in Peckham. Yes, if I wrote it as fiction I would lay myself open to all kinds of accusations and brickbats, nicked or otherwise. But the facts remain untouched by parody: a big black chap with gold gnashers told me to bring the Squashed Tomato back on Friday morning and he’d slot in a new light and re-spray the side. When I whimpered that I’d need it back by teatime, he shook his head as if I was totally, totally mad and hissed that, “The paint gotta dry…” Meanwhile, the old bloke peeled off a single tenner and pressed it into the mechanic’s hand like he was a grandchild. I retreated on foot, using the walk home to test the feeling of being stressed without a motor to stitch me from one commitment to another.

I spent a sleepless Friday night wondering if we’d ever sell the house, buy the one we’ve already shelled out a bunch of legal fees on; whether I’d get to Chiswick for my Aunty B’s 60^th birthday party the next afternoon with 4 kids and the District and Picadilly lines shut and Tfl saying there were no trains to Clapham Junction – toss, turn, toss, turn; whether I’d get to the arches early Saturday morning and find my car there and my swimming floats still in the boot so that I could be in the water to teach by nine-thirty am – toss, toss, turn, turn.. The stress in my stomach was in no small part affected by the haunting answering machine message that greeted me after work that day saying: “This is the wife of the man that went into your car. He has paid the man at the garage so if he asks you for any more money when you go to collect your car, DON’T give it to him…..”

And did I mention that through this I was doing my motherly duty by lovingly celebrating my middle-daughter’s birthday, with chocolate cake and a surprise ear-piercing? The look of utter shock on her face when she realised what was happening resonated with the week’s events. The decadence of a dreamy recall of her birthstory would have to wait for another less  busy night’s sleep.

And did I mention that, as well as the birthday presents and scabby ears, my son had football and we had to get a parping crowd to music school on Saturday morning? Never mind Blessed bleedin’ Autos, Blessed Emma stepped in and somehow collected us at sparrow’s fart the next dawn with the mist still swirling round the skips on Heber Road and took us, as I simmered with trepidation, to the arches under which I’d left my car.

It was there. As were the floats. And there was a new headlight. And every single dent and dink on the port side had been ironed out and coated with a fresh layer of ketchup, touch dry. The starboard side looked like it belonged to another car.

Never has a set of swimming lessons seemed so easy on a Saturday. Blindfold and pissed would not have made a difference as I felt so relieved and able. And despite Tfl’s best intentions, we saw Aunty B on her birthday that afternoon. On Sunday, while the world lay in, I took my son to Charlton in The Notso Squashed Tomato to play a football match and then, while Jon manned the till and my lot did their homework and Dulwich thronged the aisle in Sainsburys, I treated myself to getting the car hand-washed in the carpark by an Eastern European with deadly armpits that stun within twenty paces. Bring on the brickbats..

Surf's up.

Badges

The end of term and badges are being awarded; my swimmers have all been successful – even Wanda has been taking her Angelfish badge (STA gongs are so much prettier than the clinical ASA levels) - indicating that I can teach humans how not to drown; my own kids have been ticked in all the right boxes according to their compulsorily pre-prepared downloaded computer generated reports (with a ‘Madeline’ and a ‘Hannah’ erroneously left in at certain paragraphs – nice names in themselves, but they don’t actually belong to my offspring), thus proving my old primary school head, Mr Price, a totally shite judge of character when it came to accurately predicting my future; the bookshop threw a party that was attended by more than two people, the memory of which still lingers, like the dead flowers and the bottle-top I have just found underneath a smarting Jane Smiley.. it’s a wonder she still is; and the prospect of a hard won summer holiday shimmers like so much heat on a tarmacked carpark (yeah, right). However, one accolade that won’t be sewn onto the Brownie shoulder is the Selling the House badge (ensign: £££!).

I shoulda guessed from the start that going with an agent whose red and white notice board outside the house resembled the tip of a penis, foreskin unrolled, was a bad marketing move: “Hey, buy this house!” says the dick on a stick. I shoulda known that tidying the house up, day-in, day-out, and hiding the ironing, and placing the transistor radio over the crack in the tile beside the bath, and covering up the illegal electrical work done by Peter the Moody Slovak plumber, and even dreaming of a life where I do just one job and Jon gets to spend a weekend at home (seeing to the list of chores I have dreamt of giving him, once he’s had a good rest obviously), was a total waste of time and energy, and that cashing in the equity is only possible for the neighbours.. call it loft extension envy if you want.

There have been highlights. Well, one. When the estate agent failed to await my confirmation of a viewing and let himself into the house with a punter, only to have the alarm go off. The thought of a perma-tanned yuppie with a hangover, frantically trying to get hold of me while I was blissfully incommunicado in a nursery classroom making ladybirds out of Crunch Corner tubs as my house screamed in pain, the mind of the prospective buyer made up the moment his ears split, still makes me titter. There was a reason we didn’t hand out the code: to stop berks blundering in without warning. 

Meanwhile, I met one or two of our ‘viewers’; apparently, Sarf Lundun estate agents are overrun with heart-broken North Londoners driven out by, get this lads, rising prices. Nurse? Violins.. So, they pluck up the courage to take on the fat-tyred VWs on Vauxhall Bridge, avert their eyes from Brixton, and head into our beloved East Dulwich, where the first question I am asked is: “How do you manage without the Tube?” Well, I’ve been here since 1986 and my legs aren’t bleeding stumps yet. We have fantastic overland rail links and a gazillion buses, but the poor darlings from Highbury would rather bury their noses in a stranger’s armpit deep down underground in a bomb-trap.

The second question I am asked is: “Do you find the school across the road noisy?” No, they nail the bastards to their melamine desks and teach them in gags. S’fine. Can hear a pin drop. Instead, I reply that we have the easiest parking of a weekend in the South East, that watching the seasons change through the pupils’ work in the windows of the classrooms is such a pleasure and.. but their eyes have gone all hooded, and they’ve already decided Lordship Lane isn’t a patch on Upper Street (what were we thinking? Though they’d feel right at home with the stupid number of bloody Arsenal shirts trudging about the place).

Oooh, don’t get me started. I can’t bear the idea of any of them having my dear little tenement, with or without the mice under the sink – though I briefly enjoyed picturing their ire when our resident wood pigeon crash-lands on the bedroom window ledge at 5.30am, blasted bird. Nearly worth dropping the price twenty grand for that.

No. I’ve had enough. I’m phoning the estate agent right now to instruct them to take the house off the market. Not that we’ve had the promised hoards through the door in the last few days anyway. They are all safely back in Islington, hugging each other with relief at their close escape. Meanwhile, my kids will be thrilled. Until the Autumn. When we start trying all over again.

I had a swimmer today.

I had a swimmer today. Well, you’d like to hope so in my line of work. Parents need value for money afterall. In truth, I had two swimmers today, but the first, a lively bundle of a four year old boy, is a natural so though it is gratifying to witness the ASA training theory in action – push your tummy up and you float, now kick your legs, now do windmills with your arms – I can hardly claim too much of a hand in his success other than as a smiley conduit for scientific fact: ha ha - push the water that way and you go in the opposite direction. Especially if you take your feet off the bottom of the pool. He has only had half a term’s worth of lessons so he’ll be swimming the Channel by this time next year.

My second swimmer, however, is another story. A lumpen coffee coloured child with unblinking, bovine brown eyes, she is burdened with the name of a nineties movie star so inappropriate that the registrar should be shot. I certainly find it hard to say out loud while I’m working with adults watching.

Not that she brings any kind of grown-up to the poolside to watch her. Every lesson, week in, week out, she arrives with another girl who slots into to the parallel class. In the distant changing room, a white woman and a brown one take it in turns to bob an unidentifiable baby on their hips. They have never come close enough to clock her progress, to clap, to coax or even introduce themselves to me, the teacher. They could be teenagers, but I don’t collect the money and have to adhere to my boss’ strict turnaround so I can’t exit the water and jog down to find out as the next lesson is always lined up on poolside. I am in this bizarre responsible position of instructing their (?) precious charge how not to drown, and they haven’t even given me the once over. I could be hiding an axe down my Speedo.

Week after week I relay the practises to this unfortunately named kid, and while others of all shapes and mainly smaller sizes zip past her in a whirl of water and floats, she regards me with those eyes and barely nods in acknowledgement. Then she sets off at a slow, painful to watch pace, that makes one wonder how she attains buoyancy at all. Flop flop flop go her feet. Eventually, I persuade her to get her face wet. Incrementally, lesson by lesson, the chin goes in and then the mouth, then the nose and finally, those eyes. She never says a word and has not once grinned or laughed out loud. Meanwhile, the various toddlers and tyrants in her group come and go in a bouncing blur and I begin to wonder if she had a learning difficulty but there was no note on my register where “asthma” features regularly. Anyway, those unflinching eyes betray a hint of purpose, though perhaps I transfer a little of my own aspiration into them when I ask her firmly if she has heard what I have just said. She clearly understands perfectly what is expected of her.

Today she finally allowed me to tip her backwards off the wall. Ordinarily, we are advised to have as little physical contact with pupils in the water as possible, child protection notwithstanding, this seems to be a most unnatural way to learn to swim. Given the circumstances. Water everywhere and that. Still, I always tell them what I’m doing. I’m going to lay my palm in the small of your back. I’m going to catch your shoulders etc. I told her to hold her breath whilst on her back – not strictly out of the manual but hey, it works for beach balls – and she’d float. It was a revelation to her. Now kick, I say with one finger supporting her spine. I remove my hand and she keeps going on top of the water, legs and arms splashing like dynamos. I want to grab her and hug her but she emerges gently and goes back for another go. I glance down to the changing room but nobody is watching.

She tries the same trick on her front and floats adroitly, alarmingly calm with her face down. I find a long, noodle float and she swims under it, stretching her hitherto sleepy legs out lithely, scissoring the blue water like silk. I am shrieking inside. I want to jump up and down and throw her in triumphantly. My eyes well and I can feel pride tickling my stupid throat. All the others are pounding about, sploshing and diving and having playtime and she swims another neat measure under the float. I tell her to show her friend, the one she arrives with, what she can do. The girl goes to her, her eyes light, then instead of demonstrating her new confident paddle front and back, she grabs her nose and goes under blowing enormous bubbles, her legs bicycling fizzily. Then I look at my watch. “Time to go!” I bellow, and she slips out wordlessly and trots off to the end without looking back.

            “Good work today,” I call to the retreating muddle of limbs, unable to articulate her name. And the next class is already lined up on the poolside.

Easter holidays: Day 1

The shocking thing is, once I’d spent two days over the weekend in the decompression chamber sweating out the exhaustion, I found myself on the morning of Day 1 of the Easter holidays feeling remarkably refreshed. Natch,’ I had to whisk Freddo off to his football course – this is my latest prophylactic response to his incurable desire to boot things. Doesn’t matter where we go – the Boden Dad plains of Southwold with its putting green and Cath Kidston boating lake; the musky manure and organic heathland of the New Forest; Surrey walks; the carbon-coated swings and slides at Goose Green; the shuddering relief of the warmth inside the Palm House at Kew – my boy only wants a ball. Thus, thanks to the internet and a debit card, wherever we’ll be this Easter, Fred’ll never be far from a bloke in a tracksuit who says he doesn’t read books and who once dreamed of playing for Man U. Spot the connection. Meanwhile, me and the girls will whirling around the bird reserve on our bikes, rowing on the Mere, checking out the alpines and generally enjoying the world around us without a single comment concerning Theo Walcott’s form, or indeed Darren Bent, or Ashley Cole or any other overpaid bastard in studs, to bother us.

So girls, the world is our proverbial today, what do you want to do? A gallery? Eltham Palace? A blowy stroll by the Thames? There is a shuffle of embarrassment and the biggest of the sisters shunts the other one forward. “Go swimming?” suggests the diminutive witch, her unbrushed teeth ensuring a safety zone that, despite my desire to joshingly cuff her ear and ask her to try again, I have no intention of breeching. I regard them both, the smile beginning to palsy off my face: “You are joking?”

            “But you know how much I wanted to swim with Nancy yesterday,” protested the eldest pushing to the front, “and stupid East Dulwich pool wasn’t stupidy letting us ‘cos it was adults only on a Sunday afternoon..” I mused on the logic of this marketing strategy – who could blame ‘em? But then again, when else do kids get to go and just have fun in the water without having to earn a badge?

Ten miserable minutes later, I am stowing the stuff in the boot wondering if I’ll ever be free of the smell of chlorine. Once upon a time, a swim was my salvation…

            

Butterfly

Wanda screws to the right. Now if the thought of that does things to you, you are on the wrong website you creep, because I’m talking body position, IN THE WATER. She sort of swims lopsided in the three main strokes and this has completely buggered her confidence. It took a little analysis, of the non-psychotherapeutic kind, to find the fault and I set her up with a stroke that completely righted her chassis and caused a complete transformation in her whole appearance and attitude in the pool. One minute she’s going along like a rowing boat with one algae-snagged oar in the water, the next, in her black cozzie, with her fabulous long dark hair and good shoulders, she is slithering through the water like a serpent, barely triggering a ripple as she breaks the surface. We were at Beckenham pool and as she stitched the gleaming length, the old bids in their turbans plumping up the water with their bingo wings could not take their eyes off her. It was like the Lochness monster had slipped into their safe, clean little pond.

But for Wanda, the metamorphosis is a psychological necessity to her physical fitness. The previous week, on my advice, she’d taken herself off to her local pool, the chipped block of concrete that it is the CPNSC, which is a gob and a spit from her bedroom. Lucky her - for swimmers like me, no matter the rubble, it is a veritable cathedral and I’d give my arm to be able to tip out of my sack directly into its hallowed confines. Oh, to have a lane to myself before the schools arrive, with the sunlight filtering on to the tiles, with a mile of water to ply; it is about as near to a religious experience as I’m ever going to commune with. But Wanda loathed it. She loathed the trudge around the labyrinth; she loathed arriving upstairs beside the glinting fifty metre tank and getting into the all-round deep water beneath the gaze of a bunch of idle lifeguards who eyeballed her efforts to remain stable in the water, while in other lanes hefty blokes effortlessly zipped back and forth like trouser flies. She didn’t even have the relief of a hot shower afterwards because the pipes are bust “wetside”. Hardened centre go-ers (oo-er missus) like myself, know to use the luxurious mock beech and olive “dryside” facilities reserved for the fiscally imperative gym worshippers. Wanda came away utterly deflated.

I have promised her a return match at the big boys’ pool, but this time I’ll come too. Together we’ll ignore the poor lifeguards who have nothing else to do with their ocular faculties but Watch The Water, for which they are paid in Cheesy Wotsits, because if she does that smooth, smooth butterfly the way she did at Beckenham, she will absolutely blow those swimmers right out of the water. And in the aftercalm, as she warms down, I will tell her to duck under the rope and observe the cock-sure lane hoggers as they frontcrawl and breaststroke and bludgeon their way up the choppy metres, because every single one of those bastards screws to the right.

Smurf hat.

I got told off for wearing my Smurf hat at school last week; the deputy has an unerring knack for making me feel as if I have just been caught smoking behind the bikesheds, and I’m over forty for god’s sake (yet, I still get nervous when I go into off licences). But the reason I have been attired so sensibly indoors, is that I have been freezing daily in a state primary classroom with tepid storage heaters, whilst struggling to kick a stupid viral infection, in between teaching swimming to shivering children in unpleasantly cold private school pools - quite why an independent charging a packet in fees would fork out thousands to maintain their indoor pool at the same temperature as Reigate Priory pond is a mystery to me. Cunningly, I thought that keeping my head warm would be just the ticket to save me from taking any more time off from class work through ill-health.

Not so. It seems that now, whenever I pass the deputy in the hall, I am forced to inadvertently doff my cap to her as I check that I remembered to remove the blasted thing as I passed border control at the school gates. Suddenly, I’m very self-conscious about wearing it where ever I am. Polly, everso late of the bookshop, spotted me in Sainsburys and right away told me I looked like a schtrumf. Normally, this would make me laugh (what a European crowd we are, ha ha) but I just felt small. As small as ... well,  a schtrumf. Back at school, I was briefly enraged by the selective headwear edict (I saw an unharrassed child in a hijab in the playground and she looked lovely and warm), then I felt humiliated. I haven’t been told off for years.

Wounded, I went off at dusk to another round of teach the awkward squad not to drown (see blogs passim) and my boss informed me, in front of watching parents, that the class with the home edukes needed “a firm hand.” What, to push them under water with? I quietly boiled (not easy when you are freezing). I have no intention of getting stressed out by other people’s children, when I have plenty of my own to shout at. Christ, I could spend my entire life ratty. Where would that get me? In an oncology ward no doubt. I just want to be left alone to teach in my own special way.

Seething at his presumption and still feeling humiliated by the deputy, I continued the lessons in a subdued mood. What next? Arrest for not stacking my floats neatly? Bloody people.

The final class and the audience was diminished, not least by my boss who had gone off to find a nice warm pub to count his money in. No doubt the deputy head was measuring out a drink in a towel and a turban somewhere too, and ticking off the days on the calendar to her retirement and a terry-cotton lined pension. Three different non-swimmers jumped in: Mike who is seven and too tall for the shallow end but who, until recently, was absolutely terrified of the water; Frank, who is titchy and defies all the laws of buoyancy by being stringy and lean but remains above the water like a barrage balloon, and Trixie, who only began the class half way through last term and begins every single sentence with “I can’t…”

We did the ASA norm’, backwards and forwards, graduating from noodles to floats, repetition, repetition, long leg and kick from the hip.. and eventually, we went on to the “contrast activity” portion of the lesson and I got my brand new hoop out.  Mike went first, with his hands over his eyes and nose, getting his foot tangled as he avoided having to take anything off the pool floor to go through. Then Frank went through in his unconventional style, all roll and sidewind, scuttling like a ghekko on top of the water. Finally, Trixie tried, wearing the spare goggles I’d snapped over her head because I was so fed up with hearing her say she couldn’t do it, yet again, as she didn’t want to get her eyes wet. She ducked down and, she swam through. She actually swam. I made her do it again. This time, she went through at a good depth, with breaststroke arms and a delicious scissoring kick. She’s got it!!! Wahey! Mike and Frank looked on shivering as I bade her weave through the hoop over and over, while her mum grinned and grinned. I mean, sometimes it is really gratifying to know that your money is well spent. And from my point of view, it is such a relief to be reminded that I can do it. I can teach and get results. See..

 

I trotted out into the changing room afterwards and hardly noticed the cold – because I was wearing my hat.