ARCHWAY POOL
1 Macdonald Road,
London N19 5DD
020 7263 0613
Opening times: Definitely shut Weds mornings, which is the time I first
visited.
Added bonus: if you like wallowing in ennui
Negative points: milky milky milky
Something has occurred
to me (it probably occurred to some of you a while back, but I’m a bit slow). It is this: for the purposes of a blog I chose to start, I’m paying money to
visit, on a weekly basis, the shit holes of this city, and then I spend time
moaning about them - again, through choice. What a fucking idiot. I could stop
doing this blog, but leaving it unfinished would just add a sense of bloody
failure to the whole pointless escapade. And one annoying extra about the whole process is that the worse the area the pool is in, the
worse the pool. That seems to me to be the wrong way round. Shit areas should have nice pools, cool gold plated ones where you can swim in natural water and be wafted
dry by gods, they deserve it as a respite from life’s rubbish.
On this wash of ennui, I
return to Archway Pool. I say return, because I turned up the week before to
find it shuts on Wednesday mornings and I wasn’t even allowed to peek in,
because ‘the manager was there’. Obviously the manager is a gorgon, and the
advice was for my own good. The outside was not promising, so I hadn’t returned
with high hopes. Jaded dirty paint and a half-hearted attempt at a wavy logo on
a shitty street just past a McDonalds, 80s metal doors in horrid peeling primary paint
and a crappy reception, beyond which the hum of light from a big white space calls promisingly…
