When the going gets hot.

I said right at the start of this blog that the main thing wrong with it is that time spent swimming elsewhere is time that could be spent swimming at Tooting Lido.

I  ♥ Tooting Lido. Some people who live in my house think I go on about it too much, but I don’t care. I ♥ it in winter and in summer and in all the bits in between. And the bits in between this year have dragged on, and on, and on. The water was stuck for weeks at 10 degrees. Which is fine, but I’m not some kind of idiot, I don’t want cold cold all year round. I love winter swimming, in winter. I do NOT love winter swimming in the middle of May.

And in winter, I can do a dip in Tooting, then a proper swim elsewhere. May and June are usually GLORIOUS, water heating up, those of us acclimatised gradually upping our lengths. But now it's blazing hot? Now I shall avoid it like the plague until a small cloud creeps across the sky and the masses run away.  Now - it's for everyone else. So now, I magnanimously give you the creamy warm water, the dodging between lilos and people chatting as they go and grrrrr, the triathletes with no pool etiquette. Other people's children. Instead, shall I tube for hours across the wastelands of London to slog up and down some shitty dive and be caustic about the cleanliness? Nah. I'll rig up an outdoor shower in my garden and dream about an empty pool in the summer rain. 

 Go in the rain. Go under the cloud. The added peace is worth it. The crisp wash of cold water against your skin, the bliss of a long length, the flash of sun in your goggles. I’m not a hippy (fuck it, I am) but there is zen-like transcendence about getting lost in your thoughts while your arms mechanically churn over and over. Go for a swim, sort a problem out; now that is magic.  I know people who say ‘I can’t swim in cold water’ meaning, I’m made of more delicate material than you, you great clodding peasant. But give it a go. Yes, it’ll feel cold when you get in, even/especially on a hot day. But if you get out at that point, you’re just doing the hard bit. Stay in. Do the first length slowly, breaststroke. Put your face in gradually. Don’t fight it. Relax. You'll enjoy it, I absolutely promise, or I'll give you all the money you've spent on my blog back. 

Here are our outdoor London pools, almost in order of my preference. Try Tooting or nearby Brockwell, a surprisingly nice pool at Uxbridge or the steely cold bliss of Parliament Hill. Try Crouch End Lido, even, or for the nature try Hampstead Ponds or the Serpentine. If you need your water warm (which I understand less and less as the air heats up) try London Fields or Hampton Court. The lido at Charlton is heated minimally, and while it may be surrounded by a building site, the pool is lovely.  Richmond Pool and the Oasis both have outdoor bits, the first cold, the latter positively hot. 

Also, breaking the self-imposed boundaries of my own blog, there is a pool within daytrip distance that I highly recommend. Pells Pool in Lewes (all the info is here) is spring-fed, and sometimes manages to be warmer than other places (don’t ask me, it’s physics, innit. Or, er, chemistry, I don't flippin know). It’s a very appealing space, as mellow and warm as the old high brick wall down one side of it; and a nice big pool so room for all sorts, whether you’re a triathlete or 5. (Are you 5? Wow. You're gifted, but wasting your childhood reading this. Go and do Lego.) Lots of sunbathing space, too and some history, and there’s a lovely homemade chocolate shop by Lewes station. 

We also have Arundel, which I haven't tested so can't endorse, and Saltdean Lido, currently shut. Saltdean has a different vibe. A potentially beautiful Art Deco building right by the coast, it’s less cosy than Pells; there’s a bit of the ‘blasted heath’ feel to it. Sometimes the sea can blow a salty unkind wind across, cutting through the harshest of suns. And here, campaigners have fought the cold wind of destruction, and having cleared the first hurdle, now wait for permissions etc to move into the next phase - being open. They had a terrible fight with the previous owner who we shall refer to as ‘some arsehole’, and who wanted to demolish this listed treasure and put up flats. The arsehole didn't look after the pool,  in the hope, I suspect, that it might spontaneously fall down.  But regardless of some arsehole, the pool is substantial, and very nice for a proper trainy kind of cold swim, with kid pools and a picnic lawn if you have to bring small people along. There is a brilliant campaign (here)  that we should all support, in gratitude for a group of people who worked extremely hard. I wish them happy swimming, eventually. And I'll shout, when the gates open again. 

And if after any one of those you don’t prefer swimming outdoors, you cannot say I haven't tried. 

* PS If you see me at Tooting Lido, please say hello. I’m the one in tinted goggles and with a hunch (costume too short).

* If you have any other suggestions in easy day trip distance, let us know, via the comments section below, PLEASE! 

Nobody said it was easy.

CLISSOLD LEISURE CENTRE

63 Clissold Road Hackney

London N16 9EX

020 7254 5574

Warning: contains the C* bomb (oldplay)

Pic: Pool detail.  If I was cooler, I’d have put the pics the other way round.

I made a deal. My whole parenting is based on deals; along with bribes, complex negotiation and begging, they comprise my whole technique. I say ‘technique’, it’s more ‘making it up as I go along’, and is mostly begging. The deal was, if girl child came to the pool with me, she could pick the music for the car. She chose Coldplay. So NOW who’s the winner, the triumphant glint in her eye taunted me. We hurtled towards N16 with me wittering nostalgically about my friends in the North London. The Scientist came on, and I gaily suggested it would be a good song for their school leavers ceremony (the lyrics kind of fit, it’s harmless, give me a break, they’re 11). She turned her face away, she couldn't speak, she was in tears.  We sang it with feeling ‘NOBODY said it was EEEEAASSAAAAY’. Then I was in tears. Both of us, me for my nostalgia and for her; her for nostalgia that hadn’t even happened yet. NO ONE EVER SAID THAT IT WOULD BE THIS HARD.

The next track though, she wanted to skip, said it was a bit grumpy. Oooh, I said, I like grumpy. Grumpy suits me. Have we not met? That made her laugh, so me too. We got to the pool quite cheered up.

The excellence of friends

TEDDINGTON POOLS

Vicarage Road, Teddington, Middlesex TW11 8EZ

020 8977 9911

Shit, it’s Middlesex.

But London Borough of Richmond, so it counts.

I have excellent friends. If I used such a phrase, and if my friends had appeared from above on a ray of light with a bunch of angels singing, I’d say I was ‘blessed’. Instead, I’ll say that I’m blooming lucky, I don’t think you’d find a finer bunch of men and women, I commend them to you. One of them, Tara, has been my friend long time, we have had some times together, oh my lord don’t ask, and if she ever gets a friend vacancy, get in there quick. She is absolute tops. As an added bonus, she’s the kind of woman who stops traffic. And no, she’s not a lollipop lady.

(2) Reasons to be Cheerful

NEWHAM LEISURE CENTRE

281 Prince Regent Lane, Plaistow
London E13 8SD

020 7511 4477

Happy that: we’re in Ian Dury territory

Sad that: I still can’t pronounce Plaistow however many times I’m told.

A warning: This is the very nadir of grumpiness and sarcasm.  However, that means things cannot actually get worse (cue song) (and book). 

I try quite often to persuade members of my family to move far far away. This is not as mean as it sounds, I just think it’d be nice to visit them somewhere nice. If I could be in charge, some would live in Sydney, some in San Francisco and some on Skiathos, and I’d visit regularly. Instead, my choices include Oxford, Erdington and Essex, which is not the same thing.  Not the same thing at all.

But as this leisure centre is conveniently situated on our route through to Essex, I can kill two birds to everyone else’s one. It’s a shitty rainy Sunday, which perfectly suits the A13, surely one of the most dismal roads in the country. Just when you think it can’t get worse, there’s Dagenham.

The Royal We

GREENWICH ARCHES

80 Trafalgar Road, London SE10 9UX

020 8317 5000

I'm aware the pic is useless. There are no pics of the interior. Sorry. 

You’d think, would you not, that I would be right at home here. Huge banners float from every lamppost declaring this to be ROYAL GREENWICH and I’m from a Royal Town myself – Sutton Coldfield, as you asked - so it should somehow be in my blood. But in the same way that Sutton Coldfield doesn’t want to be part of Birmingham, I don’t want to be part of Sutton Coldfield, even though they have what I consider to be the best park in the country. I don’t think I’d be welcome anyway; they have their full quota of Labour voter and don’t want me there doubling it. 

For anecdotal purposes I should pretend that I’d coincided my trip with the Queen’s visit to the new Cutty Sark; it could have given the blog an extra royal spin, which it’s sorely lacked to date. But it was an accident. The Queen had ‘battled through’ the rain according to my car radio (so brave), and as I battled past, I could see a gathering of huge corporate umbrellas poking out the eyes of the less fortunate, so metaphorical are they.

Some iconic buildings on the way: the Naval College, the fab Observatory, the Noodle Box – but around the corner from these historic slabs the landscape goes comparatively downbeat. It has a very distinct look to it, low-lying under a big bowl sky that’s punctured by huge brick towers; this area bears its labour scars in the architecture of old riverside industries. If you go up high, you’d see for miles, and the hill right by the Observatory gives you that chance; I urge you to try it, to get some perspective, and to look down on all the royal and military buildings in the way they look down on you.

Peeling the massive chip off my shoulder before it drowns me, I get to the pool and go and change. On TV recently, Jo Brand called Streatham a shit hole, and this is the Streatham of changing rooms. The few cubicles have doors hanging off their hinges, the ‘bench’ is a shallow tiled ledge not as deep as my foot is long, so impossible to sit on; there are missing ceiling tiles, through which I keep expecting Nikita to appear. The sink has a black faux marble surround suitable for a Russian motel in the 80s, and there are strategically placed buckets collecting the aforementioned rain (I make a mental note not to use the hairdryer sitting right under the drips). It’s not filthy. It’s just a small crappy mishmash of a box.  A sign on the door telling me to wash my hands for hygiene purposes makes me chuckle with its irony.

I launch myself into the cool water, dappled with light as a tropical pool under the shade of palm trees might be.

The bit about dappled light is true.

And there are actually palm trees, painted ones, on the wall on the top balcony level of the pool.

But there the illusions end.

My normal style is to rail against the dirt and detritus, and I can certainly do that here. The water has a greenish quality as if they took the juice at the bottom of someone’s compost bin and diluted it a thousand times. (Maybe it’s homeopathic compost water…) The concrete lining is the colour of a smoker's fag finger. The ceiling is a horrible arch of pressed-fibre tiles, square lights and dusty grey air vents. It’s underlit to the point of gloom. There’s a stage at one end with a dated mural beach scene. The filter at the bottom of the pool is yicky white plastic, dirty rust creeping round the edges and blobs of manky papery crap trying to escape down into the cleaning system before it fully disintegrates in the water. There are strings of flags across the pool which fail to give it a faded fiesta feel.

But all round the edges, there are little blue wooden changing cubicles with plastic ‘modesty curtains’ shielding the top of the doors, which are very quaint. Original square windows with a deco-ish frame pattern line up round the top of the pool. The lifeguard has a chair that I really want, an old-fashioned white-painted wooden affair. I really fancy one of those chairs so I can supervise play in my garden like a bossy gnome. It’s a 25 yard pool, and the water is chill. Somehow, against the odds and defying logic … I QUITE LIKE IT.  But only for these interior features. It's not quite a party popper moment. 

I’m the only swimmer  but not the only person in the water. There’s a man wearing a weighted waist belt, going round and round the pool as if on an invisible bike; I wish to report this as a new phenomenon (do dooo de doo do). He is the third person I’ve seen doing this, in as many months. I think it’s physiotherapy.  I kept getting in his way (accidentally). He didn’t want eye contact as I attempted to do a ‘sorry I’m so annoying’ look, so I left it.

Back in the shower, I had a little rant to myself, Richard Branson related. I don’t know why it happened in this particular pool, because it applies to so many. I blame my coincidental proximity to the Queen. I’ll précis here to avoid boring you all.  I started off thinking ‘I can’t believe the residents of Greenwich are happy with this pool’. Then I realised that probably most of them swam in a private gym pool, and I bet there’s some swanky options near by. And that, people, is the way we are going with all the stuff we should take for granted. I began to draw analogies in my head between this pool and the NHS, and how the divide between private and public is becoming greater, and how much that pisses me off. Councils can’t afford to run fabulous local pools if most of the potential income is going into someone’s personal profit pocket. We need to support our local facilities by USING THEM, and then using our votes and voices to campaign when things are a bit shit.

And that’s my chances of living in Sutton Coldfield scuppered for another year. 

Barbican't

Golden Lane Sport & Fitness

Fann Street 
London, EC1Y 0SH


020 7250 1464

Positive points for: the new revamp

Negative points for: size. 

I love the Barbican. Sometimes I think I’d like to live there when I’m old, next door to Mr Scargill* if he's still alive by then (ahem) but, where would I swim? I’ve eyed up the posh pond and deemed it long enough, but too shallow.  I thought today I might have found the answer on Golden Lane Estate, which is either beside, behind or in front of the Barbican depending where you are; and as part of being at the Barbican is not knowing where you are, that’s entirely appropriate.  A board tells me I’m in Cripplegate, which sounds like some Ricky Gervais-inspired Twitter storm but is actually an olde name for this bit of the city. Golden Lane is what we used to call a ‘council estate’ (for younger viewers, that’s social housing exclusively owned by the council, rented cheaply to people in need.) Now it’s Corbusier-influenced Grade II-listed 1950s tower blocks, probably a mix of private and council owned, which is not the same thing at all.  Although it’s not-quite-the-Barbican (Barbican’t, maybe), I do like to perpetuate a cliché, so I got lost on my way in, going up the down steps and round the wrong corner so I could see the pool from a walkway above but, not having the gift of flight, not how to get there.

Happy birthday, my blog.

My blog is a year old! Who’d have thought it, my baby *wipes eyes* Now who wants cake? (the cake above was for my birthday last year. A Tooting Lido cake, what could be better? Eternal gratitude to the ever-glorious Maria Von Cake. )

In the last year, I’ve swum in 46 London pools, which is, at a rough guess,  40 too many. A few are great, some of them… well, let’s just say the words ‘fun pool’ will forever strike a chill in my heart. Flumes? Shudder. So far, a total of 870 of my minutes* was spent in Changing Villages, 560* of those 870 in showers of such piddling power it’s a wonder I ever get actually clean. I’ve straddled drains and swum through semi-skimmed milk, and I’ve been followed by some particularly persistent long black hair right across the capital.

*This is a made-up statistic.

And now, at the end of this first glorious year, it’s AWARDS TIME. Drag out your best gold lame costume, boys, and dig out your high-heeled flip flops. Yes, people, I have invented my very own Pool Oscars. In memory of John Cheever, who wrote the short story The Swimmer, I am inaugurating The Cheevers, random made-up categories for the best and worst of what I’ve seen. High Cheevers are good, and Low Cheevers are, natch, bad.