Monday 13 June 2011

Flying Without (Water) Wings


Anybody who follows me on Twitter, or even on Facebook, may have seen that yesterday I got up from my pit at an unseemly time for a Sunday morning. Well, 7.30am is not a time I usually see on a Sunday unless there’s an early morning Grand Prix on, and there was no fear of that yesterday. In fact the Grand Prix was on for most of the day it seemed and didn’t finish until I was getting ready for bed. What a race though. Those last few laps certainly woke me up. Go Button!! 

The present Mrs Hayward wouldn’t agree of course. She doesn’t follow the sport apart from when the TV coverage shows Mark Webber with his top off, but she is certain that she doesn’t like Jenson Button. She thinks he’s smug and cheesy and his father is an oik. I think Jenson is more likeable than Lewis Hamilton and his father seems like a down-to-earth sort who is plainly having a ball but we can’t agree on everything.

So, back to the reason for my early rising. If you had seen my update yesterday morning you’d have known that I got up for an early morning swim at the pool. Very sensible you might think. A nice bit of exercise before the day gets going. A chance to get in a few laps whilst the pool is quiet.

Well, yes, the pool was quiet. When I arrived I was sharing the water with a couple of old codgers who had risen early to cheat death for another day and who had gone for a refreshing dip to get the joints working. A few others turned up and, until 9am when some small kids and their parents arrived and the water flume cranked into life, it was all fairly chilled out.

I knew it would be, it’s why I went, but if you have a vision of me sliding through the water like an Eel you would be much mistaken. I went there because my confidence is at an all-time low. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve made good progress, I can front crawl with the best of them, for a few strokes at least. The problem is I am always heading towards the wall. The thought of swimming away from the wall fills me with terror. The only way that direction leads is to a watery grave. 

I made the mistake of telling the instructors this at my lesson on Thursday. This was always a mistake as they then made me have a go at it. 

They tried various methods to encourage me to stop swimming and stand up before I reached the edge, even to the extremes of Tracy (one of the instructors) standing in front of the wall so I couldn’t reach it. This meant I resorted to either swimming around her, grabbing her arms for dear life, or flailing around upside down in the water until I found my footing. It was by no means a roaring success.

They then tried to introduce me to the concept of gliding with a view to gliding and then standing up. This panicked me. It’s no use, to my mind, trying to introduce a second concept to me without me mastering the first one. I can’t glide. That’s not swimming. I only do the front crawl to stay afloat. 

I don’t think they understood this. So due to the constraints of time, and having to teach some other beginners that only recently joined, I was packed off to the shallower end of the pool to try an exercise in learning how to glide which I was frankly too terrified to do. 

I left the lesson feeling quite deflated, the complete opposite of how I felt the previous week. So, I decided I needed to regain my confidence by swimming with the coffin dodgers. Well, actually their presence was irrelevant to my confidence. I just felt they might have the public spirit to fish me out if things went wrong.

I went back and practised my front crawl, over and over again, towards the pool edge. It was whilst I was doing this that I realised what the problem was. I’m still not confident in the water. Yes, I’m more confident and I can get a few strokes in but I don’t feel at all comfortable, especially under the water. I stuck my head under a few times but only for a couple of seconds, if that.

What I really need is some confidence building exercises in buoyancy, balance, and being under the water. Until that point I’m not going to progress very far as I’ll always be swimming to the edge. I will try to explain this at the next lesson but it’s dawning on me as to why there are others at the swimming lessons who have done the same 14 week course time and time again. There’s another guy there, a ginger chap, friendly, a little bit older than me, who has obviously done the course before but is still terrified and is no better than I am after my paltry 5 weeks. 

It makes me wonder about the techniques used to teach us. It’s all very well teaching people the technique of swimming but that doesn’t help with the initial fear of being in the water. Hazel can stand at the edge of the pool and provide instruction and encouragement, and dip her pole into the water when I sink to the bottom, but that’s about as useful to me as throwing me in the deep end and hoping for the best.

I’ll go again on Thursday and explain my theory and see what happens. They may have a few suggestions as to what I should do to conquer the fear. I do hope so. 

If anything I don’t want to waste the money I spent on the course, especially as I had hopes of Olympic glory. I’ve seen online that there are other courses that may be better suited to me, more focussed on gaining confidence rather than the old fashioned approach. Unfortunately none of these courses are held where I live so I’m stuck with Hazel and her pole for the time being.

It’s not a complete disaster but I do feel a bit disappointed that I’m allowing my own fears to hold me back. I kept looking at an old chap nearby who was scything his way through the water like a geriatric version of The Man From Atlantis with absolute amazement, wondering how on earth he was doing it.

 You may not understand this predicament. If someone told me they were too afraid to drive I would struggle to understand it as it comes quite naturally to me and I have always been quite confident behind the wheel, even if it did take me two attempts to pass the driving test. It wasn’t my fault per se. My opinion was that when the examiner said to “pull over to the left” he didn’t specify that I should stay on the road. 

There was a rumour that used to circulate at the time that anything you did wrong in the first five minutes of a driving test wasn’t counted. I can vouch for the fact that this is not true. Mind you, there was also a rumour that the examiner I had on my first test, a seedy looking  man with a grey leather jacket and tinted glasses called Mr Evans, always failed the boys but passed the girls. This seemed to hold some water. I know of a girl he passed first time who, within a year, had an almighty accident on the M27 whilst she was scrabbling around on the floor looking for the All About Eve cassette she’d just dropped. 

She walked away unscathed but the car was a right off and the motorway was shut for 3 hours, much to the chagrin of other drivers. Nice work Mr Evans.

I passed the second time thanks to a lovely lady whose name I forget. She was much more generous in her marking and even let me off the sudden screeching halt I came to at the traffic lights on Winchester Road. She said that I will know not to do that next time. I guess she saw my raw driving talent. Either that or she felt she didn’t ever want to be sat in a car with me again. But I digress.

I find that the swimming pool environment is still an alien place to me. A place where you wander into the changing rooms at your peril as you are only ever seconds away from making accidental eye contact with an old man’s bare arse or a ginger man’s scrotum. Seriously I’m not looking out for this, I don’t get off on it, it’s just all there in plain view. Some men are more open with their nakedness than is surely good for them and I certainly didn’t sign up for that.

I’m going to go for another quick visit to the pool some time before Thursday so wish me luck, and look out for the headline in the local paper: SEMI-NAKED OCTOGENARIAN RESCUES DROWNING IDIOT. 

Read all about it.


Friday 3 June 2011

Are You Being Served?



I have a love/hate relationship with supermarkets. On one hand they are fun to browse around and coo in wonderment at the retail opportunities available to me. On the other hand they are desperate hell holes of confusion and crowds, where the one item I require is so well hidden that a team of trained tracker dogs couldn’t sniff it out and, even if they could, they wouldn’t be able to reach it for all the people with trolleys, and buggies, and pensioners in wheelchairs, and supplementary screaming kids careering around on heelys. 

I find there’s always a screaming child somewhere in a supermarket. Either that or they’re piping the sound in for some reason, perhaps to force me into a quick and random retail purchase to escape the noise. That happens to me quite often, I angrily throw random things in my basket, tutting about how it sounds like a pig is being tortured, and when I get home I wonder why on earth I’ve bought 20 AA batteries, some ointment for thrush, and a family size pack of liquorice allsorts when all I went in for was a pint of milk. 

It’s not just screaming kids (and in some cases their exasperated parents) that are the problem, although I fail to see why 3 adults and their 17 hysterical children need to trawl around Tesco together, it seems to be people in general. 

 It’s the old people who walk slowly, swaying ponderously from side to side, it’s the people with trolleys who just park them wherever they happen to have come to a halt, it’s the people who are always wanting to get to the shelf where I am, and it’s the people who decide to stop and have a conversation in the middle of the aisle. I know, a conversation, what are they thinking?? 

The problem is, you think you’ve escaped them when you get to the next aisle but before you’ve had a chance to see which exciting frozen products are on special offer this week along comes mum, dad, granny, sullen teenager, howling toddlers, and the whole damned circus starts again.

That’s because the supermarket is designed so that we all traverse the same route more or less, so for the 20 minutes or so I’m doing the weekly shop our lives are briefly entwined. I have been known to utter the words “I hate people” when shopping, but when you think about it, I guess it’s all the shop’s fault. They encourage us to bimble around, stop and look at the shiny new things on offer, and provide an open invitation to bring along Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all for the shopping experience.  

Bring Granny, she’ll buy some plants or surgical stockings, bring the kids, they will harass you into buying them sweets and toys, bring a cattle prod to get these relentlessly irritating people out of my way.

It’s no wonder that I forwent the supermarket for a while in favour of home delivery. It seemed to be a more civilised way of dealing with things. Thing is, I began to question the logic of this approach given that a nice shiny supermarket had opened up on my doorstep. It seemed churlish to ignore it. 

So there I was on Monday afternoon, spending part of my Bank Holiday dodging errant shoppers in a vain search for tumble drier sheets and mixed herbs (I succeeded with one but failed with the other). 

The nightmare doesn’t even end at the till point. Firstly you have to queue behind someone who has picked up the wrong item and we have to wait while they, or Tracy with the headset, goes to get the right item because they were too stupid to pick the right thing up in the first place (or perhaps because they were distracted by a distant scream from a giddy 5 year old or became momentarily light-headed from the intoxicating smell of Deep Heat from Grandpa). 

They then pack their shopping away very slowly one item at a time and finally they seem totally surprised that they have to pay for it. It’s the only way I can explain the rummaging through bags at the last minute for money. 

Then, when I get to pay for my few items the 13 year old lad on the checkout starts asking me ridiculous questions. 

“Have you been doing anything exciting today?”

“Well, funny you should ask, I went white water rafting, bungee jumped off the Eiffel Tower and set the world record for the longest distance achieved by a human being shot out of a cannon, what about you?” 

Leave me alone. I didn’t go to the supermarket for small talk, I went for tumble drier sheets and mixed herbs and when I found them in the over lit maze of a shop and followed the generic signs that aren’t truly helpful to the casual shopper I bought the wrong herbs apparently. I don’t even use mixed herbs and won’t use the fines herbes that I picked up in my haste to get out of this cavern of screeching and body odour and I’m now too embarrassed to take back because then I’d become as bad as the rest of them. They’ll live in my cupboard for years now.

To be honest I’ll probably go back to the supermarket again at some point this week so it can’t be that bad I guess. Maybe it’s a kind of mild sado-masochism on my part, just without the whips and chains. Which is a relief really as I look terrible in PVC shorts and I can’t stand the chafing of nipple clamps. 

But I digress…