Mondays and Thursdays are my days. Eight a.m. Before breakfast. The pool opens at seven for those zealous souls who like to swim before going to work. They’re gone by eight when the pool is divided into five lanes with arrows telling you which way up and which down. I like lanes. You know where you are with lanes. Let those mad fools in the fast lane work up a storm with their splashy-flashy butterfly, the sexy crawl, the somersault flip back to the beginning and off again. I’m in the slow lane. It could be a metaphor for my life.
I like lanes. You know where you are with lanes
I grew up by the sea and learnt to swim when I was six. Not in the sea but in the swimming pool where a large Scotsman in oilskins and wellies taught me how while my mother, who couldn’t swim, watched from the side. One of the selling points of the flat I bought over 20 years ago was that just across the road is one of Edinburgh’s finest Victorian swimming pools housed in a handsome sandstone brute of a building with a tower at either end, arrow slits in the basement and a great big brick chimney-stack standing 100ft proud and useless.
In the 1990s the council threatened to sell it but such was the protest that after a £5 million renovation, Glenogle Swim Centre emerged restored, its pool hall with its cast-iron columns and squiggly capitals, its wrap-around balcony, its glass skylight and clerestory windows made beautiful. The light is such as to give you the illusion you’re swimming under the sky.
Designed by the Edinburgh City Architect, Robert Morham, Glenogle Swim Centre began life c. 1900 in response to the 1846 Act to Encourage the Establishment of Public Baths and Wash-houses. It took another 20 plus years for the sport of swimming to supersede washing. A lot more than swimming goes on here now. Yoga, pilates, body balance, dance – you name it, there’s a class in it. Plus a gym and a weights room.
I’m a lazy swimmer. Some years ago I used to do 20 lengths – 15 breaststroke, five crawl. Now I seem to be down to 12, 14 on a good morning. There’s a special clock that measures your speed. I ignore it. Nor do I bother with the sauna or steam room. Sweating doesn’t appeal to me. I swim. I chat. I people-watch. (Though given a wish, it would be to master the underwater somersault.)
When, after lockdown, the Swim Centre nervously opened, scrubbed to an inch of itself, it did so with rigid rules. No stopping. No chatting. No hair spray. No anything. But the chat, the camaraderie with the regulars, the people-watching is a major part of the pleasure of the Swim Centre. It comes with the bonus of feeling you are doing something both healthy and virtuous.
At eight in the morning it’s mostly the middle-aged to old who are here in a variety of bathing gear. The men in briefs, trunks or long shorts. The women for once seeming not to mind (or not too much) how they look. They’re here to swim. Take us as you find us. No competition.
Among the regulars there’s the man who swims a few lengths, climbs out and sitting with his back against one of those Victorian pillars does what look like yoga postures. Then there’s the man whose skin is entirely covered in tattoos. Another whose knees are always worryingly bandaged. I look out for the woman I call The Lady from Aberdeen who, post-swim, appears wearing a turban of wonderfully coloured towels. And I keep an eye out for C who 20 years ago I thought looked like The Prince of the Lilies and who is still here, tall and lithe if a little less princely. I miss Singing Jimmy who used to serenade all of us with Sinatra’s ‘Songs for Swingin Lovers’ and I chat to S who aims at an amazing 40 lengths if she doesn’t lose count.
There are always one or two pool attendants good at welcoming (and hopefully rescuing if needs be) sometimes fending off possible boredom by doing their own fitness exercises, like counting steps while going round and round and round the pool. Earlier this year someone set up a help-yourself bookshelf in the entrance hall. Book addict as I am, this is a major hazard. How can I not look? And if there isn’t a book that appeals to me, might there be one for my crime-loving partner?
Then, one day someone – some literature-loving being, clearly of about the same generation as me – left a trove of old loves. Here’s the Letters of D. H. Lawrence. Here’s Elaine Feinstein’s biography of Ted Hughes, Justin Kaplan on Walt Whitman and here, for goodness sake, is Hughes’s and Heaney’s The Rattle Bag (published 1982). I’m beside myself. Here, without a doubt, is a bookish soulmate. But how to recognise him/her among the unclothed swimmers? Does he/she come in the night? The afternoon? When? For weeks I look out for more books from the same source. But it’s over. He/she has stopped, has probably finished a clear-out or handed on the library of someone long dead. There’s no more. I’ll never know who.
And maybe that’s one of the nice things about a swimming pool. In swimming costumes or trunks, everyone here is stripped of identity. We are all just swimmers. Come nine o’clock and children from various local schools arrive. They’re rowdy and lovely; their bodies straight, young, beautiful. Their excited voices echo in the arc of the pool hall. There’s always at least one who would rather not be there, one excruciatingly embarrassed, one a natural water baby. They tell us what we have almost forgotten, how beautiful we once were, how amazing it is to learn to swim. We hurry away.
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