Swimming and wailing

Swimming lesson last night, after missing three lessons due to the pool having a chemical imbalance (too much urine, methinks- it's a school pool) and half term. The teacher (don't even know his name) was on form, but stayed dry, as he had a sore shoulder. I noted that when dry, he had nice curly hair with a tinge of red. But I did catch him out on a couple of things...

I discovered that I was good at 'skulling'. I used to be brilliant at skulling pints of lager in my younger days, but this skulling is flapping your hands around and propelling yourself along on your back.

A couple of my 'demonstration' widths of various methods of getting across without drowning were spoilt by getting cramp in my calf and standing wailing in the middle of the pool.

At the end he said we could choose our favourite stroke to do a couple of widths. When I said my favourite stroke was the 'side stroke' he claimed he had no idea what I meant. I set off demonstrating it, chatting to him all the way. This is the beauty of side stroke, you can breathe when you want. He dismissed this stroke saying that it wasn't in any swimming manual. But I have actually just looked it up, and it jolly well is.

I mentioned that I thought I might be better with a nose clip, and he said, 'You don't see nose clips at the Olympics!' What's that got to do with it? Anyway, he pretended not to hear when I said, 'Synchronised swimming!'

I'm not sure I'm learning what I want to learn ie breathing while doing the front crawl. But when he's working with the others, I practised blowing bubbles and breathing sideways. It's just the rhythm that I need to do without thinking. Hard when you've managed fine by so far by keeping your head up.

Today I went with Leo and his mum for toddlers swimming lessons. Leo doesn't even like sitting in the bath. He stands. And that's WARM water. The pool is COLD. He clung to his mum like a limpet throughout, and wailed quite a lot, but in the end only sporadically. I think it was a success.

We saw these two just getting home from trying to save the world last night, they said. But I think they must have got waylaid, possibly skulling, as the world's in a pretty bad state...