There is one area in which I feel superior to Olympic athletes and that is my willingness to swim in water of a greeny-yellow hue.
Not for me the namby-pamby shrieks that have greeted the sudden emergence of wee-coloured water in the diving pool in Rio – for I have swum in much worse.
As a fairly feral child, my summers were punctuated by my mother’s occasional warnings of “Don’t come running to me if you catch cholera” as I appeared dripping at the back door, skin peeling off my shoulders (we didn’t know about sunscreen then really) and hair plastered to my scalp with some kind of slimy mud. From the river. None of your chemically-treated swimming pools.
For special treats, we went to the Serpentine Lido in Hyde Park when visiting our London grandparents and quite often, one of us would be stretchered off and told to stop making a fuss after stepping on “something sharp” at the bottom of the murky water. Character-forming, if perhaps also rather tetanus-inducing.
Even when we did go to a real swimming pool, it was in the days before the chemical stuff that made the water turn blue if anyone peed in it. You took your chances. One thing we learnt early on – you never open your mouth when swimming.
If I had only known how valuable this early training could have been in Olympic terms. It might have made me stick at the swimming instead of listening to a certain type of girl at school who could always be relied on to say “If you do too much swimming you’ll get shoulders twice as big as your doorframes”. My chance of gold medals cruelly snatched away at an impressionable age.
*Yes, we did have lovely grownup holibags, thanks for asking. Of course, when I was anticipating the first break without The Teenager, I had failed to take into account the reality that our summer hols always revolve around sporting events. This year, the Olympics weren’t going to watch themselves so thankfully there were not too many occasions where myself and Mr P had to make conversation. Happy days.
