A few weeks ago I went for a swim, something I like to do to keep fit and usually I get chance to plough up and down the length of the pool unhindered. Only on this day the pool seemed to be unusually busy. No matter, I could still swim around people in a bobbing about type of way. It's a little harder and the water was a little choppy but after ten lengths I was just starting to warm up.
At the end of the pool during this time was a lady. She had been gently excercising on the edge of the pool, bending her legs and stretching away, presumably to warm up. However, like an iceberg, and I don't mean this to be in anyway detrimental, 2/3rds was submerged, so any estimation of size was at best a guess.
As I swimmingly approached I was maybe half a pool distance away her exercise routine changed. Instead of gentle bobbing it turned to jumping, still facing the side of the pool unaware of what was approaching behind. Like some wave machine ripples started to eminate out causing my swimming bobbing motion to become a little more erratic. No problem I thought and adjusted my swim to bob up and down to the new waves. By now I was just a quarter length away, a few more strokes and I'm there.
Not so.
Just then, for whatever reason I do not know she ducked under the water. Then leaped out backwards in an arc with arms outstretched. Let me pause here for a moment, cast your eye back to the film poster for Free Willy, you know the one, Willy is depicted jumping over a boy. Well, in some parallel way I was that poster in my minds eye as the remaining 2/3rds were revealed to be, how shall we say, larger than expected and now it was midair and about to come crashing down onto my head.
I squealed and gargled all at the same time. It didn't splash down, it sploshed down creating a water hole. A human shaped hole that only appears for a moment before being filled in waterfall style by the displaced water. It had a rapport that burst my ear drums and my flimsy body was pulled towards it like a planet to a black hole. My whole right side dipped as the tractor beam like drag pulled only to receive something akin to a jedi force push as the water righted itself and a mini tsunami catapulted itself back at me sending my battered body towards the next swimming lane. I had actually risen up in the water and ended up straddling the deviding ropes with one piece of orange plastic wedged in a most uncomfortable place indeed.
Meanwhile my wave maker had splished sploshed splashed away with a wonky backstroke scattering other swimmers as she went.
It took some manoeuvring to get off the rope, my little bit of string that held my swim wear on had become entangled so I could be seen uncomfortably I may add, fiddling with my nether regions straddling a wide piece of rope for a minute or so, footage I hope never appears on You've Been Framed Doing Things. My locker key had also become detached and was now drifting somewhere in the 200 square metres its safety pin open ready to find bare feet.
So, all in all an eventful swim. Come along they said, it'll be fun they said, but the real reason I went swimming in the first place was this.
One price and its all you can drink they said.
www.petersmithcollective.co.uk Home Of Foreverbunny and the Impossimals
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