No Heavy Petting

I’ve just had to look up the word ‘petting’. This is mostly because I entered into a discussion with some work colleagues today about what my understanding of ‘heavy petting’ was.  I’d assumed that it was snogging as there used to be a sign in the local swimming pool when I was about seven which declared that there should be ‘No Heavy Petting’ and this was illustrated with the crudely drawn picture of two swimmers puckering up with a little ‘x’ kiss sign above them. 

However the online Oxford Dictionary describes petting as to “engage in sexually stimulating caressing and touching” which has surprised me somewhat and puts an entirely different slant on a ‘petting zoo’. 

The reason that petting (heavy or otherwise) became of interest is that only the day before, whilst in a pool, I’d commented to the present Mrs Hayward that there was no such restriction. I read the signs, ‘No Jumping’, ‘No Running’, etc., all of which were being steadfastly ignored by the kids using the pool, but petting was in no way prohibited. 

That’s not to say there was any petting going on in the pool, that would just be wrong, and probably unhygienic given my new understanding of the words, but I guess it’s just become an unwritten rule. After all, if you had to have signs for everything you shouldn’t do in a pool then it would be a very long list indeed. 

‘No usage of Mobile Phones in the pool, ‘No Washing of Swine in the Pool’, ‘No Riding of Mopeds off the High Diving Board’, ‘No Re-enactment of Historical Naval Battles’, the list could go on and on. 

I suppose the point is that I have never encountered the phrase ‘No Heavy Petting’ anywhere else but in a swimming pool. Maybe that’s what put me off swimming pools during my formative years, it wasn’t the deep water and fear of drowning, it was the lack of opportunities for petting with girls.

Ah yes, the swimming. Unlike my new found running abilities the swimming has gone backwards a little since the lessons stopped. I’ve lost the confidence to actually put a few strokes together to swim. However this weekend, whilst we were staying in a Marriott Hotel (tres posh - it had an ironing board and a trouser press in the room so it gets the Terry Hayward seal of approval), was the first time in a while where I was happy to float in the pool without staying within grabbing distance of the edge. 

As I’ve mentioned before, the swimming instructors taught me the basics of how to swim assuming the confidence just  comes with this new found knowledge. Perhaps it does for normal folk but if you have a phobia of deep water then it takes a little more time. So, once I’ve found a quiet pool locally, I’ll go back and re-gain my confidence. At least I can say I have swam this year, and I am more confident now than I was six months ago, so I’ve achieved something, even if I’m not challenging for a place in the GB Olympic swimming team. 

So, it’s a phobia I am conquering slowly. Perhaps next year I’ll try to conquer my fear of spiders. Who knows, I could try to tackle both the same time and swim in a pool full of spiders.

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.

In at the Deep End

I thought it was time that I posted again, lest you considered me dead via drowning, my soggy and spluttering soul forever traversing the water flume of eternity. No, against all odds I survived lesson number one, which came as quite a surprise.

There are not sufficient words available to me in the English language to explain how arse-clenchingly terrified I was as I approached the bland and functional façade of Bourne Leisure Centre, its primary coloured doors acting as the gateway to a watery hell, however I knew that I had to do it. I’d told too many people that I’m going to learn to swim, not least yourselves, so I couldn’t back away now.

I approached the reception desk with the vain hope that the instructors had been cast down with the pox and the lesson had been cancelled so I could write a whimsical “well, I tried but fate was against me” kind of post, but no, they were ready and waiting for me. 

I was pointed towards the changing rooms which I suspected to house all manner of sights, predominantly half naked men flicking their towels at each other. Well that’s what was happening the last time I went to a municipal baths but, to be fair, that was 1981 and everyone in the room including myself was aged no more than 7 years old. 

So I decided to make the best of it, adopted an ‘act as if you own the place’ attitude and swung the door of the changing room open with a breezy confidence. There was no-one there. The pool is closed whilst adult swimming lessons are on so I had the place to myself.

I swung into action and poured myself into my tight shorts, stuck the goggles on my head and went to secure my clothes in the locker. As I strode majestically across the changing room, feeling like I was Mr Universe 2011, the changing room door opened and an old bearded man appeared. He stared at me for a second, presumably eyeing up the six pack I don’t have, and he wandered into a cubicle to change into his own swimming togs. 

Feeling slightly less comfortable about parading around in what is essentially swimming pants I locked myself in a cubicle for a bit to regain my all too brief confidence. I heard the old man leave his cubicle and then I heard the sound of a shower running. Eventually, when all was quiet, I emerged and crept out into the pool area feeling ever so slightly self-conscious. 

A few kids were finishing their lessons and ran past me hooting at each other. The old man was sat nearby. He smiled at me and introduced himself as Geoff. He’d been to these lessons before and seemed to be back because he liked the company. I pointed out that I was an absolute beginner and he told me how he was taught not to be scared of putting his head under water by a (presumably) female instructor many years ago who decided the best way to help alleviate his fear was to kiss him under water the first time he did so. I guessed this was an unorthodox method and not one that would be applied here, so I just smiled and made some positive noises back as if we were two old friends in a bar and not two complete semi-naked strangers. 

Eventually I met the instructors, Hazel and Louise, who seemed excited about a newbie joining their ranks. My name was taken and I was encouraged to get into the water. This took me by surprise. I was hoping that there would be a brief interlude where I would be coaxed into the water gradually. By now however the cast of ‘Cocoon’ had arrived and were gradually submerging into the deep like elderly mermaids. If I had been worried about what people would think of my tight shorts I had no need to worry as my fellow learners most probably had cataracts and couldn’t see me. 

OK, they weren’t that old, there were two older ladies who couldn’t swim, one younger woman who said she couldn’t but she could, another middle aged woman that could swim very well, and Geoff, who by now was wearing bright blue flippers.

I can’t remember much about the hour but all I can say is, thanks to the patience of Louise who stuck with me for most of the lesson, by the end of it I was a distance out from the edge of the pool and pushing myself towards it with legs off the floor and kicking. I have no idea how I did this given my absolutely genuine fear of being out of my depth (which to me is anything above waist height). I even put my head under the water and blew bubbles. There was no kissing however, which is surely right and proper in a public swimming pool.

I can’t say I’ve lost the fear. I was just doing a good job of hiding it. Hazel told me, I suspect as a piece of motivational speak, that the bravest thing I did was walk through the door that day. I disagree. I was always going to walk through that door as I’d spent £85 on lessons. The bravest thing I’d done was appear in a public place with those swimming trunks on. However, rather than draw anyone’s attention to them any more than necessary I just agreed with her.

After I got back to the changing room and had a quick shower (alone I hasten to add) I encountered Geoff talking to another old codger who had appeared from somewhere. We briefly chatted and they were very encouraging.

Geoff didn’t learn to swim until he was 65 and the other chap when he was 57. This was actually good to know and made me feel quite positive about my first tentative efforts. 

Geoff said that next week they would be getting the weighted hoop out and he’d be diving down to collect it from the bottom of the pool. He was serious about this bizarre sounding activity and suggested that I could try it out if I liked. I’m not sure if I trust Geoff. He might go in for a snog whilst we were both under water and, with my limited swimming skills and natural sinking capabilities, I’d be powerless to stop him.

I always suspected that I might die over the next 15 weeks of lessons, but not quite like that.