I should explain at this point that I’m not a very skilful swimmer, nor very fast, but I am assiduous. Like most ‘length counters’, I have developed an extremely detailed routine, which I’ve followed for almost thirty years now, and which I stick to – rigidly. I come into the pool thirty-five to forty minutes before closing time, which gives me a few minutes to do my stretches before beginning the swim. With exactly thirty-two minutes to go, as the second hand of the clock at the end of the pool completes its minute, I launch myself. The aim is to do precisely thirty-two lengths (just over 1,066 metres) in thirty-two minutes. If I’m swimming in a twenty-five-metre pool, I adjust the target to forty-two lengths (1,050 metres) in the same time. I start in two-length bursts, then halfway through move to three lengths, and finish with four-length sections. Every second length, as I’m coming back down to the shallow end, I glance up at the clock expectantly, checking my time, and then trying to increase my pace, however fractionally. The majority of these lengths are breaststroke, but I do incorporate backstroke (in the two-length bursts) and sidestroke (in the three-length bursts). As the pool attendant blows the whistle to signal the end of the session, I’m usually turning for my final length. One final push. I finish with half a length of backstroke, then rapidly turn over to check the clock, and see if I’ve achieved my target time. Very, very occasionally – maybe once every two years – I’ll lose concentration and forget how many lengths I’ve done. This, needless to say, is extremely aggravating, and erases the value of that swimming session entirely.
There is a real poignancy in doing the same physical activity over many years. And that is you become aware of the very gradual changes in your body. You may disguise these to yourself, by running for shorter times, or swimming slightly fewer lengths, but you know your body’s capacity is reducing, however slowly, year by year. In my twenties and thirties I would do fifty lengths (around 2 km) without even thinking about it, and sometimes sixty. For a few years in my late thirties, forty-two lengths became the norm, in my early forties thirty-eight seemed pretty good, and now in my late forties, I’m down to thirty-two. At the moment going below thirty seems unthinkable, but who knows, in five or ten years … You’re probably beginning to understand why swimming is not primarily a relaxing activity for me. You might be amused, or horrified, at the numerical detail of what I’ve outlined above, but I doubt if it’s wildly different from many who run or swim or go to the gym regularly.
Set against all these numbers and counting and extertion, I should also say that the mind seems to go into some very curious corners when you’re swimming. The thoughts that come can be so lateral. As inexplicable as dreams, or as darkly comic as Woody Allen films. Perhaps this is not so surprising if we step back and consider what’s actually happening here – you’re almost naked, surrounded by strangers, all suspended in water. You might expect thoughts about birth or sex, but I find I spend a disproportionate amount of time thinking about mortality. The fact that none of us know the time of our death before it happens. Every year we live through the day on which we’ll die, with no notion of this shadow at all – the exact opposite of the birthday. Nearly all of our lives consist of deferred actions, everlasting lists, whether written down or not. All that we die with unfinished, incomplete, all the epiphanic conversations we thought there would be time for, but as the moment lumbers inexorably closer, we then understand that there is no more time. That life (if only we’d known it) was always provisional. We never reached where we thought we might reach. The summit of the mountain was always illusory.
Other people’s deaths are somehow encompassable. Our own has a ring of impossibility around it. It plays tricks with how we think of time. We can say, ‘How strange, that was the last time she ever saw her brother, two days later she was dead.’ Yet we rarely consider the last time we will see the people who are most important in our lives. The last time our skin will touch the Mediterranean Sea. The last time we will eat a perfectly ripe peach. Maybe those times have already passed … We may feel, even when we get older, that life still stretches out in a kind of infinity. We could not be more wrong. To really know, to understand that our days are ticking by, that they are limited, and that we have no idea of when everything will stop. To live like this, all the time, would be unbearable – I’m not sure the human brain is wired this way. In the final scene of the film version of Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky, the author appears as himself in a Tangier café, face wizened with age, but blue eyes still dancing mischievously – the apotheosis of life facing death. He says this looking directly into the camera:
We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything happens only a certain number of times – and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood? Some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it. Perhaps a few times more? Perhaps not even that? How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty? And yet it all seems limitless.
But the reason I need to describe this swimming pool, and my relationship with it, is not primarily to do with death – rather the opposite, in fact. Over the last few years, I’ve begun to think about the people who use this place in a different way. When I started coming here the only thing that mattered to me was the water, that this was a place where I could swim up and down for forty-five minutes. The other people using this space were simply challenges I had to navigate around. To a certain extent this is still true. London is a heavily populated city, all of us, from time to time, become aggravated by the sheer press of bodies. It is a difficult experience to have to force yourself onto a Tube train at rush hour, to have to stand with your head bowed to fit inside the door. And then imagining the panic and suffocation if anything serious happened and the train stopped between stations for half an hour, an hour …
Because of such cramped existences I sometimes feel that most Londoners hold themselves on an extremely tight rein, and that it can take very little to set us off. That, paradoxically, living and working in such close proximity to others has not meant that we now find this easier, just that we have developed coping mechanisms. You can see this every day in the swimming pool. People trying to find a kind of freedom in the water, in the elemental escape. And then, when others impact upon this small moment of release, the anger can become even greater, people lash out – a kind of ‘swim rage’, a distant cousin of ‘road rage’. Nearly everything comes down to selfish behaviour – the sense that people do not really believe they are using a space which is shared with others, or completely fail to see the impact their actions will have on other swimmers. I have become fascinated by observing the behaviour of people using the pool and the way that some have curious concepts of sharing public space.
A Sunday afternoon, the pool is full. A young guy decides he’s going to do his butterfly anyway, in the medium lane. He does one length, creating havoc. After the second length, two older women start to remonstrate with him. At first he ignores them, and then he begins to get aggressive, saying, ‘You don’t control me! I can swim how I want!’ Eventually the attendant intervenes, and the young guy leaves the pool with a volley of swearing.