Fancy A Dip?

Let me give you a piece of advice. Don’t set foot anywhere near a public swimming pool if there is even the slightest of chances that there are going to be small children present. I would willingly take a blowtorch to my armpits in preference to spending an hour in a public swimming pool in the presence of kids. This is not the irrational, ill conceived statement of a grumpy bastard; this is knowledge that has been hard earned at the coalface of bad experience.

In a leisure centre that is occupied by the janitor and two pensioners the noise is already unbearable. Ratchet things up to the tune of forty eight year old kids with the intermittent shrill blasts of lifeguard whistles and you create conditions for noise reverberation that are the equivalent of sitting inside an airtight steel fuel tank while the entire Kilkenny senior hurling team are held at gunpoint and ordered to batter it mercilessly with their camans until told to stop.

In a public swimming pool you encounter the whole spectrum of disagreeable factors – the noise, the heat, the smell and the remote chance of unwittingly catching a glimpse of twenty eight stone Fionnuala from Station Road in her birthday suit should the tarpaulin she brought to protect her modesty accidentally slip.

It is a symphony of the most offensive and unpleasant conditions imaginable. The thermostats are unerringly set to 120 degrees regardless of the weather conditions outside. When you come through the sliding front door you are assaulted with a cocktail of heat and humidity that can’t be too far down the discomfort scale from being slapped repeatedly with a sheet of plywood. Then there’s the smell. Jesus Christ are you sure that stuff is not going to harm my skin? Based on the pungency of the odour I would say it was a chemical concoction designed to eliminate every living organism within a ten mile radius. And I’m going to swim in it? If the noise, the heat or the smell don’t get you, fear not, you’ll probably dislocate a few vertebrae when you inevitably slip on the ceramic tile some genius installed in the communal shower area. Non slip tile, anyone heard of it?

Add it all together and you come up with an experience broadly comparable in terms of enjoyment to being bound, gagged, blindfolded and duct taped to the fuselage of an F16 fighter jet on a nocturnal surgical bombing mission over Fallujah. Avoid like the plague unless of course you want a dose of the plague because I’m pretty sure that, after yesterday’s visit from Tadhg the dairy farmer for his bi annual fumigation, it is now residing in the shallow end.