Chatty Man

This week has been a week for random conversations with people. It started on Wednesday when I boarded a train at Peterborough station. I sat at a table and before I’d had a chance to get comfortable the guy on the opposite side decided to spark up a conversation with me. He said that Peterborough was “a wild west town”. This was news to me. I’d not noticed anyone strolling through Cathedral Square on a horse wearing a cowboy hat and no wagons have been attacked by Red Indians lately. 

I glanced at the people across the carriage who I noticed were keeping their heads down. They’d obviously been on the train with him for a while and had heard quite enough for one day. I quickly established he was getting off at the next stop so decided that politeness was the best course of action and so I nodded and smiled. It turns out that he was an East Londoner, originally hailing from somewhere near Wapping “up the road from Murdoch”. 

He now lived in Stamford but found the place to be too much like “Midsomer Murders”. I guess this was an observation that there’s not a great deal of social diversity in Stamford when compared with the Old Kent Road rather than a confession to a series of grisly murders. He seemed surprised that strangers greeted each other in the street in Lincolnshire without there being the underlying threat of impending physical violence. From what I could make out he seemed to like it in Stamford but, after three years of “recharging the batteries” he was moving back to be within the sound of Bow bells. 

Apparently he “knows what’s what” in East London, although the picture he painted was less than rosy suggesting that all the urban areas of London were at war over immigration. He had apparently had an animated discussion about this with George Galloway when he turned up on my fellow passenger’s doorstep canvassing for votes. According to him he “told Galloway how it is” until “he got all intellectual with me”, so I guess that George wasn’t reprising his impersonation of a cat.

The chap got off at Stamford and we bade each other farewell. My new companion at the table from there on was an old lady with an impossibly large rucksack. Maybe she was the murderer and the rucksack contained the bodies, either way she wasn’t chatty at all.

That evening I was staying in a pub-come-hotel in rural Gloucestershire. After enjoying an evening meal there I decided to prop up the bar for a last pint of the evening and soak in the local atmosphere. Fast forward a couple of hours and that last pint had increased to a few last pints, one given to me on the house from the barman, Tom, and I was getting a guided tour of the pub and the cellar from the landlord, George. It turns out that it was a very old pub and was once used as a court house by Judge Jeffreys back in the 17^th century. I was even shown the tree from which the guilty were hung. 

I retired from the bar late that evening having met pretty much everyone in the pub. I’m not sure how that happened but all I can say is that you don’t get that sort of camaraderie in a Premier Inn, regardless of what Lenny Henry says.

On Saturday night I found myself on Twitter. I like Twitter. If you choose to you can end up in conversations with all manner of people. For instance that night I ended up having a brief Twitter chat with the guy who slapped a plate full of shaving foam into the craggy chops of Rupert Murdoch. I discovered that the perpetrator of this brief blast of social anarchy had not used the cheapest shaving foam money could buy. He used Nivea, as that was all he had in the house. I suggested that he was doing the octogenarian aussie a favour and that the aloe vera will in fact serve as a very able moisturiser and that perhaps Mr Murdoch senior should be thanking his assailant rather than pressing charges but unfortunately we both agreed that this may not be the water tight defence he was looking for.

So it turns out that I can have a random conversation anywhere really, propped at a bar, trapped on a train, or via the information superhighway after a few light ales. There’s no moral to this story. Just a sort of shrug of the shoulders and a comment of "it’s a funny old world”. 

I suppose it makes me wonder who I’ll meet this week although I think I’ll aim for less of the anarchists and more of the genial pub landlords dishing out free beer and local history lessons.  That way I stand more of a chance of finding out useful pub quiz information and less chance of being assassinated by Mi5.

Spider/Man

I don’t like spiders. I don’t know whether it’s their sneaky behaviour what with all their weird web making shenanigans or whether it’s just the look of them. I’m not hugely enthusiastic about most bugs but I can accept that the spider has a place in the general food chain and helps to tackle the menace of flies.

I would be happier however if the spider population would keep themselves to themselves. There are clear boundaries as far as I’m concerned and any rebellious arachnid spotted in our house is duly apprehended and escorted from the premises. This arrangement has been working well and I’m guessing that news has got around that all spiders are persona non grata at Hayward Towers as less and less of the eight legged devils have been bothering us.

Mind you I did have a bit of a stand-off with a particularly large brute a few years ago who gave me no option but to use maximum force.  He pushed his luck though. After a lengthy pursuit around the lounge I finally got him cornered, just behind the sofa. At this point the sensible thing for him to do would have been to back off and allow me to show him to the door. However instead of capitulating he took a run at me. 

Startled by this turn of events I did what any red blooded male would do and dived out of the way with a girly shriek. The spider, not believing his luck, made for the safe haven of behind a radiator. The only option was to inflict the ultimate punishment for trying to make me look foolish in front of the present Mrs Hayward. The vacuum cleaner was unleashed and this mighty foe was sucked up to spider heaven. 

Our latest visitor arrived just last week, in the shape of a small beige coloured spider who was trying to blend in with our bedside table. He failed in this chameleon-like activity but had the good sense to make a move before I could point out that he was trespassing. Since then he has hung around the bedroom in a hard to reach place, in the corner of the ceiling above the bedside table, and so we have reluctantly shared this communal space. 

Last night I woke up at 4am with a tickly cough. I spluttered a little and put it down to a dry throat. It tickled again and I coughed. This wasn’t going away and after a few hearty coughs I sat up and reached for the glass of water beside the bed. As the water washed down I could feel something tickly washing down with it. Had I swallowed a hair? No, that feels different. I gulped down all of the water until I felt the tickle reach my stomach which started to gurgle in eager anticipation of this early morsel.

While I was sat there, listening to the birds twittering outside and watching the first glimpse of early morning light creep through a gap in the curtains, I remembered a statistic I’d heard. The average person swallows four spiders per year whilst they are asleep. I had taken this to be an urban myth. I mean seriously, how could that happen? If that happened to me I would wake up, probably coughing and with a weird tickling feeling in the throat……oh.

I flicked the bedside light on and looked up to the corner. My squatter had vanished. He’d been there all week and now he’d gone.

I can only assume he clambered down to investigate where the loud snoring was coming from and had tracked the source of the offending noise to my open mouth and rattling vocal chords. Unfortunately this curiosity was his first and last mistake. They say curiosity killed the cat, but you can now also apply this to spiders. 

On the bright side his death may serve as a warning for other daring beasties. The giant two legged creature that lives there eats spiders. Stay away. I do hope so.  

Life on Earth

I am alive. I feel that’s worth pointing out as I’ve not posted for a little while. A busy week at work and then a week off distracted me from chronicling events from my existence here. 

I can’t even say that much of note has happened. Well, last week cows seemed to play a small but noticeable factor in my life. Usually I can get from point A to point B without encountering any form of cattle but last week one stray cow held up the train I was on and the next day, whilst driving to Great Yarmouth, a sign warned me of cattle on the road. 

Sure enough, there up ahead of me was a great horned beast ruminating in the middle of the road. The bovine in question seemed unconcerned at the traffic trying to squeeze past him and he just stood there chewing the cud. The locals also seemed to be used to navigating around cattle so I felt obliged to take it in my stride and not mention it when I arrived at my client’s site. I went for the great British talking point of the weather; you can’t go far wrong with that.

I didn’t get a chance to have a look round Great Yarmouth sadly but I made up for this disappointment by taking in the Las Vegas of the east coast on Monday, Skegness. A popular destination for people from Sheffield judging by the number of football shirts I saw, an almost equal number for both Blades and Owls. We did the usual seaside things, a whirlwind of ice cream, arcade games and gift shops. I did however reclaim the Hayward Championship Air Hockey crown after a bitter fought battle with the present, uber-competitive, Mrs Hayward. At least she didn’t try to take out a passing punter with the puck this time. She takes no prisoners when she is in the Air Hockey zone. Blood has been spilt, but rarely our own.

I also bought a holiday hat in Skegness. It’s a marvellous straw effort with a blue band which I stuck on my head for my own amusement, and surprisingly Mrs Hayward said she liked it. I sought reassurance that she wasn’t taking the piss but she seemed to be genuine in her appreciation so I bought it. I find it goes well with my new Hawaiian shirt, although I do look a bit like an extra from the TV series Benidorm, apparently. We’re going on holiday with some friends in August, they’re in for a treat. 

On Tuesday it rained, so I bought a grass strimmer. I haven’t used it yet but I’m looking forward to the moment I crank it up and attack the harder to reach grass and weeds in the garden. I am also in the market for a hedge trimmer and a garden vac. I never knew that gardening could be such fun, just introduce a few gadgets and I’m there. 

We also went swimming on Tuesday and I was able to startle Mrs Hayward by showing off my new found swimming and floating skills. I have recently discovered I can swim under the water for a few metres without dying so I feel quite optimistic that I am finally getting the hang of it. I even swam a length (albeit in two halves) in a depth of 1.25 metres. You may think I’m getting ahead of myself but I think 2012’s resolution may involve snorkelling or diving. I shall be a modern day Jacques Cousteau.

Wednesday brought a trip to shops and some clothes buying for our foreign holiday later in the year, followed by a trip to the pub with a friend who was one of the public sector workers striking on the Thursday, so was rightly taking advantage of the extra day off. As far as I could make out she had no plans to stand by a brazier with a placard on the picket line but I guess her absence made the point.

Thursday brought us our 6 year old niece for a few hours, who has all the energy of an army of 6 year olds. We took her to Paint a Pot in Bourne which is an entertaining experience. I found myself reverting to her age as I sat there painting a pottery Tortoise. However whilst I was painstakingly trying to stay within the lines, but failing badly, she was going for a more production line approach and painted a plate and a spoon rest in the time it took me to badly paint the little creature. I mean really, I’m 37, surely I should be able to manage something better than this….

It was a fun experience though and I realised why parents know so much about kids TV. You get sucked in. Our niece was sat there watching Roary the Racing Car but eventually wandered off to make some chocolate crispy cakes. I however just sat there watching the constant stream of children’s programmes being blasted at me. Eventually she came back whilst I was engrossed in Emily Elephant’s first day at school in an episode of Peppa Pig. She looked at the TV and then looked at me quizzically. “Uncle Tezza” she asked, “why are you watching kids programmes?” It was a very good question for which I couldn’t provide a suitable answer. She wandered off again and I turned over to Top Gear on Dave, although I couldn’t help but wonder if Emily Elephant eventually settled in. I suppose as long as the school isn’t over-run by ivory poachers she’ll be fine.

 On Friday I decided to go for a run in the woods. I haven’t been up there for a while but thought that it would be safer to run there in the middle of the day than dodging the trucks on Cherry Holt Road. Mind you I almost turned round and went home when I pulled into the car park as it was all looking a bit Brokeback Mountain. A guy in a sports vest was there, in the car park, doing press-ups and another was doing star jumps. I’m sure that’s fine and it’s probably a lovely location to undertake some press ups and star jumps but I’m suspicious of energetic shenanigans in Forestry Commission car parks so I just parked up, got onto the trail and started to run. 

There weren’t many people around so I could jog through the trees without fear of embarrassment. It also means that I can go at a comfortable pace when no-one’s around, as for some reason I tend to speed up and try to look as if the whole thing is effortless when I encounter people. 

I did have a brief reunion with a hound that I had met a few weeks previously. There was I jogging uphill (yes, I know, a hill in Bourne, but this is the north-west side of Bourne where the flatlands end and normal landscape resumes) when this brown Labrador appeared in the distance. Thrilled at the sight of someone other than its owner it started bounding towards me. So suddenly I am in the bizarre situation of running towards a dog that is also running towards me. I was just considering the insanity of this situation when a voice shouted out “Princess!!”. Both the dog and I stopped and looked around. On reflection there was no good reason for me to look round, I haven’t been called ‘Princess’ in years, for shame. It was then I realised this was the same dog who had bounded towards me some weeks earlier.

The owner was friendly enough and he said a cheery ‘hello’ to me as we passed. I breathily returned the greeting but sadly it was accompanied by a little bit of drool and a sudden and unexpected expelling of gas, thus making me appear to be significantly less civilised than his canine companion. I have to be careful with that, a friend of mine once had a bit of an accident after going out running when he had a dicky tummy. The end result was that he had to make his way home through some city streets during the early evening in the middle of summer wearing an obviously soiled pair of white shorts and brown stains down the back of his legs. That, as he would say, is another story.

Friday night brought drinks with friends and Saturday morning brought the inevitable hangovers, although Mrs Hayward suffered more than I for some reason. However with the careful application of Orange Lucozade and Flumps she recovered so well that she was fit to go off with the wife in waiting to see Take That again, this time at Wembley. There were some rumours that Robbie had exposed himself onstage in Cardiff which led to some giddy excitement that it could happen again. Personally I don’t see the attraction but I hope they have a nice time. 

 So that leaves me home alone on a Saturday evening. What to do? Go out? Stay in? It’s a tough decision. Knowing me, by the time I’ve made up my mind it’ll be time for bed.

So that was my week more or less. How are you doing?

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.

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…

Raise the Titanic

Is it safe to look? Is everything OK now? Good. 

I’ve had a bit of a mare on the technology front. Firstly my Facebook account was hacked into by an unknown person or thing who wanted to steal my identity no doubt. Good luck to them I say. If you’ve read my recent posts and wish to take on this duck-fearing existence then you are more than welcome to it. I’ll even throw in my drinking trousers just to get you on your way. Thanks to the very nice people at Facebook, perhaps even Mr Zuckerberg himself, this matter was quickly resolved with little collateral damage, apart from my hometown being changed to Bourne, Massachusetts. If anything it enhanced my knowledge of American Geography.

Then, in a totally unrelated incident this very website died. I logged in and it told me I didn’t have a blog anymore. I feared that one of you, possibly an ornithologist with a particular penchant for the Argentine Blue Bill Duck (and who wouldn’t, it is the vertebrate with the longest penis in relation to its body size, think of the possibilities if ducks made porn) had been incensed at my last post and sought revenge on me.  Fearing the worst I turned off all equipment with web access, which is more than you’d think, and tried to retreat into an e-hermit status. 

However I quickly became bored and lonely in my virtual cave so stuck my head out and discovered that this was not some feathered nemesis but a technical fault. So here I am, back out on the information superplodway and ready to Facebook, Twitter and blog until my heart is content in the hope that someone, somewhere will give a damn that I had sausage and chips for tea. 

OK, so I didn’t Facebook or Tweet such inanity as I was too busy stuffing my face with said sausage and chips and, as a man, multi tasking is not a strength. I have learnt this with my swimming as well. Oh yes, the swimming. What can I say? I feel a little embarrassed that I was making such a fuss in my previous posts but in all honesty I was absolutely terrified of being in deep water. The thing is I wanted to learn to get over this phobia so I forced myself into going for lessons. Posting on here has helped because I feel sort of responsible to keep it up now I’ve told people I’m doing it. 

You may not care two hoots but it motivates me and some people have asked me about it when we’ve met and, being a natural crowd pleaser, I feel obliged to share in my achievements rather than my abject failures. If I said that I’d chickened out and hid behind the sofa cramming Jaffa Cakes down my throat instead (which yesterday evening about 6.45pm did sound like a more attractive option) I would look like a pathetic loser and, even though you wouldn’t actually say it, I would still see the disapproval in your eyes, and quite right too.

However I have discovered a new perspective on the cruel sea, or Bourne Leisure Centre Pool as it’s known. It’s a sort of love/hate relationship I guess. For most of the day on Thursday I hate it. I would rather do anything to avoid going and was even wishing illness on myself last night to avoid the whole sorry spectacle of a grown lump of a man splashing around in the water. However I always end up going, I always do better than I thought I ever would, and then for the following 24 hours I love it. Then it starts to occur to me that next Thursday will come round before I know it and that feeling of dread takes over again.

I shouldn’t beat myself up though. Four lessons in and I have abandoned the flotation device (called a ‘woggle’ by Hazel, the instructor) and I’m doggy paddling. Last night I was even two strokes away from swimming five metres. Apparently that’s quite good given the fact that three weeks ago I was clinging to the side of the pool like a Limpet. 

I do find my confidence building while I’m there but I haven’t completely conquered my fear just yet. As any sailor will tell you, the sea is a cruel mistress and she is ready to welcome you into her warm embrace at any given moment. Yes I might be able to float on top of the water with ease, yes I can paddle with my arms, yes I can kick my feet, and yes I can breathe in, stick my head under the water and breathe out, but all of these things at once? Not a chance. 

Well I can for a while but every now and then Hazel has to remind me to kick or to breathe as I’ve forgotten. However I do seem to be improving and I was getting further and further away from the edge when she suggested I might like to try five metres. Feeling brave I decided that it can’t be that difficult so I went for it with gusto.

For the past few weeks I knew the day was coming where I would lose control and revert to where I believe I should be, flapping about at the bottom of the pool. I had been living on borrowed time, and last night the sands of time ran out. 

I started well, head in the water, arms paddling, legs doing something behind me, but as the side of the pool got nearer I realised that I was sinking. To be fair I got my feet back down and stopped, which was a surprise as I’d not done that before. Strangely undeterred I decided to go again. This time I thought too much about the whole ridiculousness of the situation. I can’t swim. I’m a natural drowner. I was probably the Titanic in a previous life. So, with the side of the pool in sight I drifted under the surface like a submarine.

However this submarine had legs and as they came down I slipped on the floor of the pool and lurched forward, my arms outstretched. Time slowed down. As I fell forward I felt some air of calm. No-one really tells you how serene and relaxing being underwater actually is. I reasoned that if I ended up on all fours staring at the tiles on the bottom of the pool I just needed to stand up again and all would be fine. I saw Hazel’s pole appear in the water ahead of me. She has this with her so that I can grab on to it so she can haul me out if needs be rather than to prod my lifeless corpse as I had previously suggested to her. I’m a tricky student.

Despite my predicament I didn’t feel that grabbing her pole would be appropriate or necessary. Whilst my mind was considering the options my legs took matters into their own hands (so to speak) and shifted themselves round so that my feet were firmly planted on the floor. Don’t ask me where they came from but before I knew it my head was once more above the water. I spluttered briefly and tried to regain my eyesight. Hazel asked if I was OK. In response I burped loudly as I guess I’d consumed a generous mouthful or two of chlorine-filled pool water. My heart was pounding like an express train but I was alive, and I had saved myself.

Part of this was down to a website I’d strayed onto the other week that pointed out that it takes a long time to drown. This thought I believe enabled me not to panic and flail around wildly and leads me to think that things aren’t as bad I thought they would be in this situation. If anything I was embarrassed rather than hysterical.

We gave up on attempting the five metres and I went back to what I was doing, paddling a shorter distance, but I’m not far away from it and no-one is more surprised about this than me. Even though it’s a relatively short distance they’ve got me swimming in just three lessons, and pushing me to do five metres in the fourth. Given there’s another ten lessons to come, who knows what I’ll be able to do come August? 

My hopes are on Olympic glory next year, even if it means becoming the new Eric the Eel. Wish me luck!!