HIGHBURY POOLS
Highbury Crescent
London N5 1RR
020 7704 2312
Negative: Overheard: ‘It’s vay dirty, considering how much you pay for membership’.
Warning: quite a lot of preamble.
When one’s children are small, one does things that one might not otherwise chose to do: to pass the time, knacker them out, attempt to maintain adult relationships, to bitterly cling on to what one deemed a life, as if the life one had before children suddenly on their birth became so retrospectively brilliant its passing must be mourned. In that joyful spirit of acceptance, I used to meet my old friend Robert, whose son was about the same age as mine, in the playground of Highbury Fields, on the understanding that they would play while we chatted, laughed, heads back ha ha ha, discussed creative ideas. Our understanding, note, not theirs. Actually our whole time was spent trying to maintain peace, rubbing elbows and knees saying ‘oh, that didn’t hurt just a little scratch’, yelling NO DON’T HIT STOP GET DOWN, sighing tiredly and doling out bits of organic dried mango where they craved beef jerky. Once, it was too wet for the playground so we took them swimming to Highbury Pools, narrowing our chances of conversation even further, even though my lovely successful Alpha-in-every-other-way Male friend hated swimming, couldn’t, actually, but that didn’t matter as we didn’t get much chance to have both legs off the bottom of the pool anyway.
