I am unfit. I am unfit on an unprecedented level, I fear, and in the past I have done quite a lot of swimming. Not as a kid. As a kid I resented the long, sopping hair down my back, always catching it for being late to the next lesson, the indignity and struggle of getting dressed in a rush. It would be years before I found out I need hat, goggles, nose clips and ear plugs to be a genuinely contented and efficient swimmer. Obviously, as is so often the case with things I was forced to do as a kid, I have been grateful in recent years for what Miss Sewell taught me about swimming. Turns out my crawl is not too bad and I've had a bit of help from a coach at a pool I use when I'm working on a particular police training site. He does lifeguard duty and gets bored to smithereens, so if he can find any kind of tutee, he is delighted to pass on technique. I'm slow, my shape is not very aqua-dynamic, I find it boring beyond measure, but I do have spasms of enjoying improving my technique, the spasms forming and integral part of the 'technique'.
I buy a month's pass at the pool, marveling at the price, thinking of what it costs me to go to the Brixton Rec, which I know is by no means the most pricey choice in London. The pool area is magnificent. It is shabbily magnificent, but it is something to behold nonetheless. It has a history, the Long Street Baths, and it has incredibly clean water. I'll do more than a month's worth of swimming in it while I'm here and there will not be a single moment of ear trouble... maybe the earplugs are contingent upon where I am swimming after all.
I also get to pick up tips as this is a nation of swimmers, well, of white simmers, obviously. It is a hearteningly multicultural venue, though, for South Africa and there is often a coach - from the overweight chap in his later years through to the very young woman in shorts, both of them frighteningly sour: they would not have got a stroke out of me. So much of learning in my childhood was shot-through with terror: terror of failure, terror of doing the wrong thing, terror of my teacher. And the state of terror isn't great for learning.... well, it's not for me, anyway. Terror makes me stiff and jumpy and hideously forgetful.
I earwig on the lessons of some of the small people sharing the pool with me and tweak my stroke even more: I'm just an amazing swimmer, really, I am OLYMPIC. I have to keep thinking that because I am just that little bit claustrophobic, and some other word I'm sure, which has to do with being afraid of the deep water being deep and wide and empty and.... watery. How I ever became a Master SCUBA diver is a mystery to me. Well, no, actually it's a key character trait of mine: I'm inclined to do things that terrify me. And swimming basically terrifies me. Putting my face in the not-quite-cold enough water makes me very uneasy indeed, I have to control my breathing and my ignorant fear. Focus on the rewards, Rebecca, even if they seem rather.... hard to comprehend at the moment.
And, as with swimming, so with the creative process, I try to drum into myself as I toil, pointlessly, up and down the pool. I just need to stick at it... and not panic.
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