This evening lovely husband and I took the kids swimming at the Pyramids in Southsea. I haven’t been swimming there since it first opened. In 1988! I am so old. Apart from looking a bit tired it really hadn’t changed a bit, the wave machine still worked, the staff looked just as bored as ever they did and even the same brats splashed me in the face and swam into my legs. I assume they were the same brats, they certainly had that same “going to grow up and appear on Jeremy Kyle” look about them.

I’m not quite sure why I only ever went once. Cost would have been a factor but I imagine that the fact I’ve always hated swimming was probably the main reason. I grew up in Petersfield, a few miles north of Portsmouth and when I was a child the only pool we had there was an outdoor one. I hated that place and still blame it for my aversion to swimming. It could have been a scorching hot summer’s day but the pool temperature would still have been absolute zero. You would actually have to psyche yourself up to get into it such was the shock of cold as you hit the water and if you didn’t get moving straight away you were in severe danger of getting hypothermia or frostbite.

When I was about 8 or 9 my school, in their infinite wisdom, decided to send us to the horrid arctic pool for a week’s swimming instruction. At the end of the week’s “fun” we would all participate in a swimming gala, racing against our friends in front of our parents. What a shame I couldn’t swim. I’m sure they tried to teach me but as I was terrified of the water I resolutely refused to let go of the (slightly chewed) float meaning that I ended up in the pity race with the one other child in the school that couldn’t swim. As I was taller and much stronger than him I won easily but the victory was hollow and my humiliation was complete when the exercise was repeated in the following 2 years since I still hadn’t learned to swim.

Eventually at the age of 13 I taught myself to swim in a nice indoor pool that was all warm and everything. But the damage was already done. To this day I am a rubbish swimmer, I must be one of the only people in the world that can’t do the breaststroke, even though I’ve really really tried I just can’t get it right. What I do is a sort of slow crawl where I don’t get my face wet and if I’m able to keep going for any period of time I veer to the left and get in people’s way. It’s useless and exhausting.

I don’t want my kids to end up like me but the boys missed out on baby swimming because I couldn’t afford to take them when they were little. Happily their schools seem much better at teaching them than mine was as number 1 son can now swim and number 2 son seems well on his way to learning. And as for the baby she absolutely loves the water and shrieks with delight the whole time she’s in the pool. Maybe I should try that?