Summer grandparenting: penguins, fish and dragons

We’d been talking about penguins, Elliott and I, as one does when breakfasting with a four-year-old.

‘And you know,’ he solemnly announced, ‘they live near the North Pole.’

‘Near the pole,’ I agreed, but adding a gentle correction, ‘but the South Pole. There are no penguins near the North Pole.’

‘Oh, yes, there are.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I continued, as gently as I could.

‘Have you been to the North Pole?’ he countered.

He’d spotted the weakness in my argument.

‘No,’ I admitted, but then added, ‘Have you?’ 

I’d found the weakness in his.

‘Yes,’ he assured me, putting paid to my trivial objection, ‘for my birthday.’

Well, what could I say? It wasn’t, after all, completely inconceivable that his parents had taken Elliott to the Arctic for his birthday. Unlikely, it’s true, but not beyond the wildest of assumptions. After all, his parents like to make his birthdays special, and what could be more spectacular than a polar expedition as a celebration of turning four? And if he’d been there and seen penguins, I’d look pretty damn silly to be denying their existence, wouldn’t I? Empirical experience trumps learned belief. 

It’s true that discovering penguins in the Arctic would strike a serious blow to the beliefs of ornithologists, but why should we care for ornithology anyway? It’s all for the birds, I reckon.

This illuminating conversation took place at our home near Valencia, and during the third grandparenting session of the summer. 

First Matilda had come on her own. Well, perhaps I should say stayed with us on her own. I took a train to Madrid, collected her from her dad at the station, and travelled straight back to Valencia. At the end of the stay, her mother did the reverse, jumping on a train to Valencia’s main station, and travelling straight back with Matilda. It may sound like a painful waste of time, nearly four hours in trains with barely a pause at the destination, but Sheena and I agree that it’s a glorious way to get a rest and do a little reading.

Trains are the luxury form of travel of our era.

Less luxurious, it turns out, were the sleeping arrangements for Matilda. We’d decided to replace the old sofa bed which converted into two single beds for her and her brother. It wasn’t a particularly good sofa and, it turned out, it wasn’t a particularly good pair of beds either: it coped badly with three or four years’ use by young kids. That, I suspect, was at least in part due to its not being even adjacent to the top of the range from Ikea.

So we got a new one from further up the Ikea range. It’s a much better sofa. Sadly, as a bed it wasn’t half as successful. At least, not initially. It converts into a bed by lowering a hinged back to join the sofa seat, but of course it doesn’t join seamlessly. There’s a bit of a gap between the two, and Matilda made it clear that she was less than pleased with this new arrangement.

‘My old bed,’ she told us sadly, ‘was a winner.’

By contrast, the new one, with the gap down the middle, was a loser. 

The solution? A memory foam mattress that we lay across the bed to cover and neutralise the gap. And the reaction from Matilda? None at all. Which is excellent. No news is good news and no complaints means a satisfied granddaughter.

There are things that grandparents – well, grownups generally – say that they should perhaps learn to stop saying. I remember when I was a kid I loathed it when people asked me ‘shall I keep you here? Shall we send your parents home and you stay with me?’ I never knew what to reply to a suggestion that ludicrous.

Less ludicrous but perhaps not less futile are the questions that probe affection.

‘Who loves Matilda?’ Danielle asked.

‘Mamama and Granddad,’ Matilda immediately replied, correctly identifying Danielle and me, in that order.

‘And who loves Mamama and Granddad?’ Danielle pressed on, asking one more question than necessary and opening the door to a potentially regrettable response.

‘Elliott,’ said Matilda, providing one. 

Following her solo visit in June, Matilda was back the following month with the whole family. It was damn hot. But Elliott had no problem about pursuing the unconventional solution, demonstrating to us all what the elegant young man wears to breakfast in hot weather.

Elliott well-dressed for summer

He also showed us a fine way to spend the time in such conditions.

In the summer, just chill

Not that resting was an activity for him alone. He and his sister were both occasionally exhausted enough to need some recovery time.

Recovery time

What put them in this state was, above all, the pool. This was the summer for swimming. The pool we share with our neighbours offers two equal pleasures: meeting friends when they’re there, or ‘having the pool to ourselves’ as Matilda would put it, every time we arrived to find that they weren’t.

It's been a summer of rapid progress. In June, Matilda wasn’t yet ready to get rid of her aids – flotation vest or mask – but by July she was striking out without them and on this, the latest visit in August, when the two of them came with just their Dad, she’s been swimming full widths of the pool unaided. She’s even jumping in with complete confidence and without having anyone to hold her hand or catch her in the water. She hasn’t quite reached the stage of swimming a length – she still has to overcome her fear of the deep end – but that’ll come soon.

And just yesterday, as I write these words, Elliott too passed a new milestone. Without aids, he swam between his Dad and me, repeatedly. There are some small technical matters to overcome – like trying to get his body horizontal in the water instead of staying vertical with his nose just above the surface – but he was afloat and, most of the time, moving towards a goal.

They may not be quite ready to rival the fish, but they’re both on the way.

No wonder they got tired. But at least they could relax whenever they felt like it, watching their new favourite series, all about Vikings who tame dragons and have wonderful adventures with them. Truly relaxing, since each episode seems to follow exactly the same structure as every other – humans and dragons go somewhere that proves less safe than they think and find themselves battling with nasty villains, or the nasty villains come after them even when they stay at home – things go badly wrong until it looks as though disaster is unavoidable – and then, to our ever-repeated astonishment, things all work out just fine after all. Immensely enjoyable. 

Apparently.

So it’s been a summer of successful visits all around. With much to remember them by. Though, to be absolutely fair, I’m still not convinced that there are penguins at the North Pole.

I mean, I checked with ChatGPT which assures me there are none. But, hey, which is a more reliable source of information? Today’s halfbaked Artificial Intelligence or the natural intelligence of a four-year-old grandkid?

It’s a tossup, I’d say.

And another rite of passage:

Matilda dumping her milk teeth

Best granddad. Or the worst

The best Granddad in the world opens the door
for Elliott to make all sorts of new acquaintances

‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’, wrote the American thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson. To him, it didn’t matter whether you always held the same beliefs, only that whatever you believed, you endorsed it forcefully and upheld it energetically at the time you believed it. ‘Speak what you think now in hard words,’ he urged, ‘and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day’.

Well, it seems that at the tender age of three, our grandson Elliott, who has just spent four days with us without his parents or sister, is a convinced Emersonian. Indeed, I suppose a purist among logicians might go so far as to claim that he falls into a fallacy, the excluded middle. 

It seems that I am either the best granddad in the world, or the worst, but never any of the little dull things in between.

The visit started well. There was the ice cream in the centre of the village of La Cañada, to which our street belongs (I like to think of the shops in the centre as ‘downtown’ and, since the pocket handkerchief of a square with the ice cream shop has the same name as Madrid’s great Puerta del Sol, clearly the village authorities feel the same).

Joy is an ice cream

Later there was the opportunity to make the most of the cherry season.

Or a bowl of cherries

We also went several times to the swimming pool. It’s not ours alone. We share it with fifteen other households, but that’s not many and we often have it to ourselves. 

It took a little while for Elliott to get his confidence back, after a year without swimming. We spent our time mostly in the kids’ area, which is reassuringly shallow. But we were able to get some good games going, when the best granddad in the world (definitely!) swung him around in circles with his feet in the water or supported him while he doggy-paddled around. The best was when he came and sat on my lap while I sat on the bottom of the pool. That meant I could move around with him in that safe position, to the delight of us both.

Enjoying the kids’ pool with Granddad

But, sadly, things turned much less satisfying that evening. He and I went to Burger King, usually a moment of supreme pleasure for him. But, maybe because he’d been to the swimming pool twice that day, he was tired. He barely touched his food, announcing that he no longer liked nuggets, an astonishing declaration from someone who had always previously been a great fan of them. Then, while waiting for his dessert, he headed back to the play area, something he loves taking advantage of while at Burger King. This time, however, though he dutifully removed his shoes, as specified in the instructions, instead of climbing up to the top of the construction in order to slide back down from floor to floor as he usually does, he just lay on the ground without moving.

Eventually, his dessert was ready. It was ice cream with caramel sauce on it, which should have been received with enthusiasm. Sadly, it had been served with a spoon stuck upright in it. 

‘You’ve tasted it!’ Elliott challenged me and started to cry.

‘I haven’t,’ I assured him, with perfect truth.

‘You have, you have,’ he repeated, tears now running freely, ‘I don’t want it.’

He pushed it away.

No amount of reasoning on my part could convince him to eat it, so I started preparing everything to leave. But, rather than throw out his ice cream, now melting away, I quickly ate it myself. After all, he clearly wasn’t going to. On the other hand, with hindsight, it occurred to me that it wasn’t a move liable to make my protestations of innocence – true though they were – any more believable.

I’d undoubtedly become the world’s worst granddad.

Just before things turned dismal:
this playground, as well as rides, has rocks, water, fish and turtles

Nor was what I think of as the Burger King Incident the low point of the visit. That came the following day. We went to a favourite playground of his, by bike, him in the kid seat behind me. Everything went fine until we were a couple of minutes from home. There’s a downhill stretch there so I was going fairly quickly. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but I think I hit a bit of a shallow pothole, causing the front wheel to rise off the ground and, when it came down on loose stones, to slide away from me, bringing us both crashing down.

Poor Elliott. He had a terrible shock and wailed to show it. Fortunately, and this was confirmed by a paediatrician later, he had no worse injury than a nasty graze on his arm. With the help of several people who came rushing over to our assistance and assured him he had nothing seriously wrong, it was easy, courageous boy that he is, to calm him down quickly. He stopped crying though I don’t think his view of his granddad improved at all.

Meanwhile, my left leg and arm were covered in blood. I took a look at the knee and thought, ‘oh Lord! That could need stitches’. A neighbour tried to patch me up with steri-strips but she was convinced, and convinced me, that I needed to go and see a nurse. The nurse re-did the patching but told me I just had to go to hospital. As I feared, that meant spending five hours in an emergency department waiting for treatment which, in the end, involved six stiches.

The only good side to all this is that we had, I felt, reached rock bottom. The only way forward now was up. Or so I hoped. And it turned out my hope was justified.

I took Elliott out for another bike ride the next day, but of a very different kind. He was on his own bike and, since it’s a little big for him, I trotted along behind him holding his shoulder so he didn’t fall. That was a far more satisfactory experience.

I asked that afternoon who the best granddad in the world was.

‘You,’ he said.

One way of looking at that is to see it as Emersonian non-consistency. However, I like to think it’s more a matter of not holding a grudge. And in my view, that’s a really good character trait.

By then, I wasn’t feeling too well, so I retreated to bed. But Danielle tells me that when she dropped him off with his dad at the station in Valencia, Elliott told him, ‘I wish I hadn’t gone on that bike ride’. 

That’s amazingly mature for a three-year-old. It’s also entirely legitimate. I share the sentiment and also wish we hadn’t gone on that bike ride.

All I can say is, ‘don’t worry Elliott, or Matilda, that’s the last time granddad goes out on a bike with a child behind him. I can live with the chance of injuring myself, but never again want to put either grandchild at risk.’

Something I’m sure Sheena and Nicky, their parents, will be relieved to know.

 

Distrust the beauty spot: it may have something to hide

This weekend, we went walking up in the mountains at a place called Loriguilla, near Valencia. It overlooked a glorious lake reflecting both the encircling hills and the clear blue skies which we still get around here, with amazingly warm temperatures, even in October.

The lake and hills at Loriguilla

But while you can enjoy the beauty, it’s no bad idea to distrust the appearance…

The place has a few ruined houses, along with some new holiday cottages, clustered around the wreck of a church. Paths lead up to the high hills where one can walk along water courses rushing across the hillside and disappearing into tunnels, taking drinking water to the city. The other way, one can walk down to the lakeside and a dock for rowing boats or canoes or, indeed, for swimming from.

Mountain lakes? Even in a hot October I distrust them. “Come on,” said Danielle, and two friends who were getting rid to leap in. But I didn’t share their enthusiasm.

Besides, they didn’t actually leap in. They felt their way tentatively from rock to rock at the lake’s edge, as the water gradually came further and further up their bodies. To, I should say, an accompaniment of screams and exclamations, all of them on the subject of cold.

“Yes,” thought I, “sounds delightful. Enticing even. I might just stay here.”

The three of them eventually got in and all assured me that it was “wonderful once you’re in.”

“It’s wonderful once you’re in.”
I was happy to believe them. And observe. From a distance

What kind of statement is that? It means it’s horrible getting in, but not quite as awful once you’ve done it. They may be right, but what I loathe is the awful transition between pleasant warmth and dryness and blood-chilling wetness before you can get used to it.

“Come on, you’ll enjoy it.”

But I chose not to trust that kind of reassurance. I’ve been exposed too often to “try it, you’ll like it,” claims. Often, they’re about various kinds of particularly revolting-looking food. Long, long years of experience have taught me that if food looks unappetising, it generally is. Equally, if water looks bitterly cold, that’s generally exactly how it is.

I was enjoying being able to wear shorts and a tee shirt in October (in England, my friends have already broken out winter pullovers). So I stayed put and revelled in the feel of the dock underneath me and the sun above, while the others swam around claiming I was missing a wonderful experience. Frankly, I was happy to believe them, just as long as I didn’t have to put it to the test. Belief, sure, but trust, no.

Much more my style, to lie about on the dock

The temperature of the water wasn’t, however, the only thing to distrust in that idyllic spot.

Why, you might wonder, were there only ruined houses and an abandoned church near that lovely lake?

It turns out that the church had been the place of worship of a village further downhill. Downhill? The lake’s downhill from the church. And, yes, you guessed it, the village is at the bottom of the lake.

It was the lake itself I ought to have distrusted.

It may be beautiful, but it isn’t natural. It’s made up of valleys flooded by a dam. It is, in effect, a reservoir. It holds some of the water Valencia needs. Which is, of course, a good thing. Though not a lot of fun for the people who used to live in the old village of Loriguilla.

A ruined church: monument to a lost village

It was in the late fifties that they had to go. At the time, Spain was under the rule of the last of the West European fascist dictators, Francisco Franco. People didn’t get much of a chance to object to his decisions. Or at least, not to do it twice.

To be fair, they were moved to new houses. But did they want to go? Who knows? And if they didn’t, it barely mattered to the people who ran the place at that time.

That’s the thing about so-called ‘strong men’, and Franco liked to be referred to as ‘El Caudillo’, roughly translated as ‘the strongman’. They can make things happen. They do that because they don’t have to worry about how other people feel. It’s effective but it isn’t necessarily pleasant.

Something we ought to bear in mind when anyone expresses admiration for strong and decisive leaders today. Like Trump. Or Boris Johnson. Or Erdogan. Or Putin. Or Bolsonaro. Or rather too many people around the world for comfort.

Come and enjoy the lovely lake at Loriguilla, in or out of the water. But spare a thought for the village it hides. And then ask yourself: is this the way I too want to be treated?

Parenting. We do it so well. Simply by instinct.

“Will you cut that out?” yelled the exasperated mother from the swimming pool changing cubicle behind mine, her voice battling with the sound of the wailing child.

The injunction had the effect you’d expect. The child’s crying grew louder.

“Honestly, it’s always the same. You just have to go and spoil everything.”

A louder explosion of wailing.

“Every time. You just can’t stop yourself.”

A pause. Sobbing.

“Well, don’t think you’re going to have any friends. You’re just a horrible little girl. No one’s going to come over to see a horrible little girl like you. Clara isn’t coming.”

More sobs.

“And Caroline isn’t coming either. No, she isn’t. Why should she come and see such a horrible little girl?”

New outburst of wailing, with some barely distinguishable words.

“Sorry? No, you’re not sorry. Why would a horrible little girl be sorry?”

The wailing dies to sobs, to whimpers, to soft crying as the child regains control.

in a shaky voice: “I really am sorry, Mummy.”

“No you’re not. But you will be.”

The wailing starts up again.

The great test we all just naturally know how to pass

Life calls on many of us to do two key jobs, with little preparation.

For one of them, staff management, we are at least able to call on some training, such as it is, though it isn’t much: usually abstract with little bearing on everyday business life. It’s all Drucker and Maslow and countless other academics, but little to do with the team member who’s missed another deadline, but also happens to be a harassed mother let down by her childminder.

For our other great responsibility, parenting, we generally receive no training at all. Especially now that we no longer live in extended families, with grandparents and older siblings around to offer the gentle, tangential hint that there might be a better way of doing things. And occasionally a little help.

Bringing up a whole new generation, securing the longevity of our species, we do by the seat of our pants.

But then, as the exchange I overheard at the pool confirms, we’re just naturally born to do it well. As Bill Bailey would put it, we take it to it like a duck to a pancake roll.

Who needs training?

Thoughts spun, words mangled

It’s wonderful how the human mind can twist its thoughts to meet its wishes.

My wife has just finished her first week in a new post. Interestingly, she’s taken a job in the same line as our eldest son, neatly reversing the tradition of children following parents into their chosen professions. 

The stress of taking up a new position makes it perfectly comprehensible that this morning, a Saturday, she slept in a little.

But me? I had no such excuse.

The result of waking late was that, when I decided that the minor badminton injury I’m still carrying meant I shouldn’t play today, and that we could go for a swim instead, it was perilously close to the 10:00 end of the session at our local pool. In the end, we had only 25 minutes in the water, an embarrassingly short swim.

“Ah well,” I said to myself, “it’s best to start gently again after a week off for an injury. Gradually ramp back up.”

Now I know that’s just a variant on the sour grapes story: presenting the effects of laziness as an apparent instance of judicious thinking on my part.

Still, in the French version of the Fox and the Grapes story, La Fontaine finishes by asking whether the disappointed animal didn’t do better by writing off the unreachable grapes as undesirable, rather than living with his regret. “Didn’t he do better than to complain?” the poet asks.

The Fox and the Grapes:
La Fontaine gave a new twist to Aesop's fable

I think my gentle – how shall I put this? – readjustment of the reasons for the shortness of the swim, admirably fits that approach to life. It’s spin, of course, a key tool of us marketing types, and boy, is it useful. As any politician or other advertiser can testify.

The visit to the pool provided other lessons too. The Brits complain of the Germans’ devious use of beach towels to book sun loungers by hotel swimming pools, or deck chairs on the beach (odd term that, isn’t it? What deck are they on?) This is something my compatriots consider both deplorable and risible.

So it was amusing to find that a lot of the swimmers this morning had left their outdoor clothes and other kit in the changing cubicles, thereby booking them for their own private use. 

A secondary effect is that it avoids them the expenditure of 20 pence on a locker. There must be things you can still buy for 20p, but I can’t think of an example off hand. And certainly nothing particularly desirable. Many of these cubicle occupiers are children on swimming courses that cost their parents significant sums; it’s hard to imagine that 20p more would make much of a difference.

The habit’s particularly irritating when sheer numbers of people mean there are no other cubicles free, as was the case today. The solution was obvious, and we adopted it: we used the cubicles anyway. Telling kids frantically knocking on the door that the cubicles weren’t theirs to book was as satisfying as piling a bunch of beach towels onto one deck chair, to use the others.

Private booking of public amenities
Irritating but by no means confined to the Germans

Not that the kids will have learnt anything. Words are far less powerful than one likes to believe. But then, we misuse them so often. I recently reminded a colleague that others were waiting for him to complete a task, and he replied:

“Ah, yes, sorry, that still requires an action on my behalf.”

My view was that the only action required on his behalf was a well-placed but metaphorical boot up the backside. That might get him to do what was needed on his part.

But perhaps I’m being unfair, inferring more from his statement than he was implying. Or, as he would no doubt express it, the other way round.

Ah, words, words. How we misuse them. Back in the pool, I got to thinking about the word “cool”. I suppose its positive connotation comes from a certain ideal of calm and self-control. There are, however, plenty of things it’s not particularly cool to have cool: a bath, a coffee, a reception.

Come to that, the pool’s pretty cool. Which is one of the least cool things about it.

Keeping score in badminton. Better than counting lengths of a pool

One of the advantages of the weekend, is that the kind of exercise I take changes.

During the week, it’s swimming. But at the weekend it’s badminton. And that’s a huge improvement. Not just for the obvious reason that badminton doesn’t involve total immersion in cold water, or contact with any kind of water at all except perhaps in a bottle, but because badminton’s actually more fun. You score points in badminton – well, occasionally you lose them – so you can work out who’s won.

A winning point, as a shuttle dips over a net

It’s impossible to tell who the winner is in swimming, except that I have a sneaking feeling it’s the pool. Certainly, I always feel I come in second.

I suppose the reason I enjoy a game, as opposed to a sport, with a scoreline rather than mere endurance, is that I’m fundamentally competitive. That doesn’t mean that I expect to win or anything. I like to think I’m far too much of a realist for that. What I have is more a kind of potential competitiveness: the sense that in a competitive game, there is a chance that I might win.

After all, it does sometimes happen.

There’s a curious phenomenon that comes into play here. The same thing, I’m told, happens in childbirth. Clutching the little bundle of joy they’ve just received, and blissfully unaware of the 20 years of sheer ghastliness ahead, new mothers lose all memory of the pain they’ve just gone through to get that bundle of devilry into the world in the first place.

The same thing happens to me with badminton. I know I must have lost a whole bunch of games because I know, with my rational mind, that I played rather more games than I won.

Make that substantially more games than I won.

But the detail of any one of those defeats? Expunged from my mind as though they’d never happened. The victories, on the other hand, stay with me in glorious detail, to be replayed at leisure in my mind afterwards. For instance, in that wonderful bath into which I let my aching limbs subside.

With swimming, there’s no such joy. Just a vague sense of achievement. Though since I leave the pool by the same ladder that I entered it, even that is somewhat limited: all that effort to get back to place I started from? What was the point? Where’s the mileage in that?

It was like that in the days when I used to go running. However far I ran, I always ended up back at the car. Like one of those nightmares, or Alice in Through the Looking Glass: you run and run but you get nowhere.

So I’m enjoying the weekend. Badminton on Saturday. Badminton on Sunday. And some games I’ll win.

Then Monday, I’ll be back to swimming. And it’s a safe bet the pool will end up ahead. Again.

The pleasure of futility

Ah, the pleasure of futility. Yesterday, last full day of our holiday on Majorca, we indulged ourselves in a large portion of it.

I should explain that we’re staying on a little bay, or more of a rocky inlet, of the Mediterranean. Turn right and you get to a larger bay which enjoys a short strip of beach, decorated as usual with deck chairs and umbrellas, and the town of St Elm.

The day before yesterday, Danielle and Nicky swam from our bay to town. Danielle has a broken foot. Swimming’s great, since she can enjoy the exercise without much pain and it even seems to help. Of course, Michael and I assisted, driving into town to meet them with all the things they’d need when they came ashore.

Nicky and Danielle set off

Except, regrettably, that we forgot the bag with the towels and clothes. Fortunately, the round trip from St Elm to the apartment only takes eight minutes, so Danielle didn’t have to wait long shivering on the beach as the sun set in a blaze of glory – and a precipitous drop in temperature.

And, sadly, it was only when I got back that Nicky realised that he’d forgotten to include a tee-shirt in the bag. Fortunately, it was still only an eight-minute round trip to fetch one of those too.

We’d also forgotten Danielle’s crutches, but I’m glad to say we found them not far from the water line, the following morning, neither stolen nor washed away.

St Elm sunset. Glorious to watch if you're dry.
Not so good if you're shivering and waiting for a towel

The exercise had been such a success that yesterday we decided to have another long swim. Well, “long” in our terms. Out to the island in the middle of the bay. 

The island was perfectly placed. Far enough to represent a challenging swim, close enough not to allow us – well, me – to back out and protect my laziness on the grounds of difficulty.

I have to admit that I always like this kind of challenge. Mountain streams when hiking? Just have to cross them. That’s why I tend to come home from mountain walks satisfied but with wet feet.

The challenge of the island
Too far? Within our range? Any point in the first place?

It’s the same with islands. There’s a tremendous satisfaction swimming to a place which can’t be approached except by water. Well, obviously, only if it’s within range. I’m not crazy. And only when it’s in a proper sea, by which I mean a warm sea, like the Med, not the North Sea or even the Channel. I’m not a masochist. 

So Michael, Nicky and I had a go. It was perhaps the experience of the day before that put us off aiming for a goal other than our starting point: we’d learned that we weren’t good at making sure everything we needed was available when we arrived. So it was a round trip for us. Out to the island, and back again.

Initially, our intention was to land and have a bit of a break, but when we got there it was a lot less hospitable than it had looked from afar. No beach. Just viciously rough rocks encrusted with razor-like shells, on which the surf broke with considerable energy, as I discovered to my cost when I became the only one of us to try clambering ashore.

We swam round the island, found nowhere that appealed, and headed back to our inlet. It took us a good hour and gave us the sense of really having had a swim.

The sea has great advantages over a swimming pool. Lowering oneself in remains a painful experience, but actually less so than in the pool: the water in the Med’s at least as warm. It isn’t chlorinated. And it makes you more buoyant.

If there’s a downside, it’s that the stuff won’t stay still. It keeps piling itself up and throwing itself at you. It usually contrives to do so whenever I do something reckless like trying to breathe. I really feel something should be done about its behaviour, though nothing ever is. What do we pay our taxes for?

Still, I mustn’t complain. We had a good time. Expended a lot of energy, which I’m told is a good thing. And got back safely.

Back, of course, to exactly the same place we’d out from. All that energy, all that effort, all that swallowed sea water. It got us precisely nowhere, by way of somewhere we didn’t want to stay. Completely futile. And yet highly enjoyable.

Providing yet more proof that it isn’t the destination that matters, it’s the journey.

Between two coffees: so much can be done, if one can find the energy. And the will

The French have a fine wine known as “Entre deux Rives”, between two banks.

This is not a tribute to those fine people who brought us the 2008 financial crash. We’re not talking about a wine between Lehman Brothers and the Royal Bank of Scotland. It probably doesn’t cost enough for those worthy fellows, though if it did and someone else was paying for it (the taxpayer, say), I’m sure they’d enjoy it as a change from Champagne.

No, the banks in question are those of the Gironde and the Garonne, in the Bordeaux region where the wine is made.

This morning a new notion struck me, that of “Entre deux Cafés”. There is a precious time in my life between the two coffees with which which I like to start each day. As a general rule, it’s a time of quiet reflection and calm contemplation, in which I might, perhaps read the Guardian.

Reading the paper is an important ritual, even if in my case it no longer involves any actual paper, since I read it on Kindle. It enables me to find out what atrocity the Israelis have most recently committed, or indeed their fine disciples, now far ahead of them in vileness, in the organisation I used to think of as Isis.

Isis has, of course, announced that it now wishes to be known simply as the “Islamic State” or “is”.

In the first place, I’m not convinced we should be particularly concerned with what that organisation’s wishes are.

But in the second place, it’s a ludicrous name. I suppose the Wizard of Is might be a less factitious and far nastier version of the Wizard of Oz. But imagine the awful sentences to which the name could lead, such as “they are is”. Perhaps such barbarity towards language is appropriate, though, as the linguistic expression of their barbarity on the ground.

Occasionally, I don’t allow myself to be drawn entirely into reading the newspaper. If I can dredge up the courage from somewhere, at times I’ll go swimming between the first coffee and the second. It has to be between: leave myself the time to drink the second, and any courage for the swim has gone. The time will seeped away too, as it happens, especially since one of my colleagues had the genial idea of organising a daily conference call at 8:30 a.m. That rather limits my room for manoeuvre in the mornings.

So it’s off to the pool after the first coffee, with the second ahead of me as a promise of reward for my virtuous behaviour.

Today, however, it was different. It’s a Saturday and this afternoon we have friends coming over for wine and cheese. That’s the kind of party I think of as 50-50: I’m not that keen on cheese, but I like wine more than well enough to be fine with the 50% I can enjoy. 

We both work, so Friday isn’t a good time for cleaning. And at 10:00 on Saturday we generally have a couple of hours of badminton, after which we’re too clapped out for cleaning. And yet, with people coming round, cleaning had to be done.

Such a space, between two coffees
To be filled with so much. Swimming. The news. Even cleaning

So it became a task for between-coffee-time. One quick coffee and then, from 7:45 to 9:30, out came the sponges and the scourers and the cleaning products.

Oddly enough, it was strikingly similar to swimming. The drudgery’s perfectly bearable, no real hardship at all. And at the end, the sense of well-being is overwhelming. With swimming it’s mostly physical, with a dash of self-satisfaction over one’s display of virtue; with cleaning, it’s entirely moral, but the self-satisfaction’s all the stronger.

And – at the end – there’s another coffee.

A great way to start the day.

The faith that shakes atheism and moves goggles

There are times when it’s hard to maintain my hard-won atheist convictions. 

Not on the big things. I still find it conceptually impossible to reconcile the existence of an all-powerful, beneficent deity with, say, ISIS running amok in Iraq and massacring its prisoners for the crime of belonging to a separate branch of the same faith. To be honest, I have difficult reconciling such a belief with the blundering, flip-flopping behaviour of the leaders of our Western world in response to that terror.

I’m often reminded of the excellent exchange in that outstanding film Lincoln when Mrs Keckley, dressmaker to Mary Todd Lincoln, expresses her confidence to the President that the 13th Amendment banning slavery, will be passed by the US House of Representatives.

Elizabeth Keckley: I know the vote is only four days away; I know you're concerned. Thank you for your concern over this, and I want you to know: they'll approve it. God will see to it.

Abrahan Lincoln: I don't envy him his task. He may wish He'd chosen an instrument for His purpose more wieldy than the House of Representatives.

Quite so. In the same way, it’s hard to imagine that an all-seeing God could ever have put any faith in a Dubya Bush or a Tony Blair to make anything but a pig’s ear of the Middle East.

No, much smaller things shake my atheistic faith – or lack of faith, for why shouldn’t lack of faith be shaken too?

The other day I turned up at our local leisure centre for another early, far-too-early, swim. Now as I’ve said before this is not an activity ever likely to give me what one might call pleasure. It’s a grim business, undertaken for health reasons and absolutely no other. I therefore take a number of measures to guard against the horror of the exercise. I take what I like to think of as a water Walkman (as in “what – a Walkman?” to which the correct answer is “Yes”). 

And I take goggles.

The Walkman staves off insanity, if merely being at the pool at that time of day isn’t sufficient evidence of insanity in itself. The Walkman’s a key contributor to surviving the ordeal. But the goggles are even more vital. Without them I emerge from the chlorine with bloodshot eyes and, while I’m not bothered about the effect on my appearance (looking like some kind of undead monster might actually win me more respect), it does gall me that the eyes hurt in a low-grade way for the next three days. 

So when I looked in my bag and realised that I didn’t have my goggles with me, I cursed myself under my breath. Going home was out of the question. Buying another pair meant going back out to reception and, in any case, I hadn’t brought enough money with me. There was nothing to it but to go ahead and swim without them and bear the consequences.

And there, as I approached the showers, lying on the floor in front of me – was a pair of discarded goggles.

Now I wasn’t going to steal someone else’s. I naturally gave them in to reception to hold in Lost Property. Just – not immediately. Getting on for an hour later.

A mighty matter of miracle and faith

After all, you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, even if in this case it’s a loan horse. And you certainly don’t reject a miracle. Which, surely, this must have been.

So, Lord, please accept the thanks of this your errant and unbelieving servant. Even though I don’t really believe you exist, I’m deeply grateful for the mercy you showed me the other day.

If, existent or not, you had a moment to sort out the mess in the Middle East too, well, that would be just great. But I don’t want to sound too grasping. I remain truly thankful for any minor miracle you put my way, to save me from my many incompetencies.

No miracle too small

Mind over matter? Well, it's not that easy a battle

Some days I wake up horribly early.

I know, I know. It means I’m getting older. It’s the only explanation. But before you do any gloating, just remember – so are you.

On occasion, if I’m awake at around 5:30, I think “I really ought to go for a swim.” This is because I’m convinced that I need exercise. If nothing else, it might help me sleep through the night and not wake up before the alarm goes off.

But a conviction that it would do me good isn’t the same as any enthusiasm for the prospect of exercise. Especially wet exercise. So I may be up and making coffee at quarter to six in the morning, completely convinced that this is a great opportunity for a swim, but it doesn’t mean I actually want to.

Inviting? Not at stupid o'clock in the morning

Why swimming at that time of day? Well, firstly because the pool is open to its full 50 metre length. So you don't have to turn so often. Which is a boon. Besides, I find that after three or four hours work, I’m even less inclined to struggle into the pool than at the crack of dawn; after seven or eight hours, reluctance at the idea turns into abhorrence. 

So it has to be first thing.

Now the reluctance isn’t intellectual. The mind is fully convinced that I’m going swimming. Which is easy enough for the mind. It isn’t the mind that has to deal with the water. It can loftily choose to do this horrible thing; the victim, the one that has to undergo the experience, is the body.

What therefore comes into play is that deep, veiled will that’s buried in our bodies themselves. It knows it can’t challenge the mind directly: it’ll always lose a rational argument. Instead it acts deviously, it works by misdirection.

“Look!” it says, “Washing up. You said you’d get it done.”

Washing up doesn’t take long. Might as well do it quickly. And the minutes crawl on.

“Does the cat have enough food?”

“Did you let the dog out in the garden?”

Eventually, in a last desperate throw of the dice, when already on the threshold, ready to lock up and head for the door, the horrified body raises a final objection: “did you lock the back door after you let the dog back in?” It knows that my mind is much too neurotic to say “screw it. Who cares?” and just go.

This rearguard action doesn’t often avoid the dreaded fate. But it means that it doesn’t matter what time I get up – it can be 5:00 in the morning – I’ll never be in the water until after quarter to seven. Delaying tactics live up to their name: they make you late.

Talk about mind over matter. Well, my body has a mind of its own. The battle’s no pushover. The body fights back. 

And at the very least, buys itself some time.

Badminton reduces the horror of exercise and adds a spark of Schadenfreude

Swimming’s a real super-sport. Exercises every part of you. Doesn’t put particular strain anywhere. But it has one huge intractable problem: it involves covering yourself in cold water.

True, it’s not that cold. However, my benchmark for water into which I might immerse myself is the kind you find in a bath. Swimming pools are a lot less alluring than that. And, in the winter, when it’s quite cold enough outside, the allure is still less marked.

So it was a great relief to opt for badminton this morning instead. You don’t get undressed for it. You quickly get warm. It doesn’t involve water, at least not until the post-game shower. And it’s fun: you even know who’s won, which is difficult with swimming (although in my case, I reckon it’s the pool that wins. Every time).

A joy in itself. And it can even deliver a lesson on life

The place where I played is an informal club, where you just turn up and play with anyone else who’s there. It has a few unwritten rules. If there are too many people for the courts, you take it in turn to sit out a game. If beginners show up, everyone plays with them at some stage or other, to make sure they’re fully involved.

Well, when I say ‘everyone’, I’m exaggerating slightly. There are always a few people who just know they play better than anyone else, and are therefore entitled to rise above the mere rules that govern the rest of us. They never leave the court. And they turn their back, in disdain, on the weaker players on whom it would be a waste of their precious time to squander their talents.

As well as being amusing in itself, this behaviour turns the badminton club into a microcosm of society. We live in a world where a small number of highly privileged people believe that they owe their positions to their superior talents – actually, we owe it to them to ensure they have those positions in recognition of their superior talents – and they know they’re entitled to ignore the rules if it suits them, or even to buy themselves governments that will change them on their behalf.

The sense of entitlement. The bane of modern society.

We had an entitled player this morning. The only time I saw him voluntarily leave the court was when two other men suggested that he make up a four with the three of us; he clearly wasn’t going to lower himself to playing with me so managed to persuade someone else to take his place.

Instead, he moved on to the court next door and started a game with three friends of mine. The one playing with him is an impressively powerful player, though not always as accurate as he’d like. When his strokes come off, they’re often unbeatable, but they don’t always come off. Still, overall he’s a strong player, an asset to have on your side and I’m happy to play with when I get the chance.

Now, here’s an interesting aspect of this state of affairs, and again it reflects the nature of society. The people who feel they belong to a self-appointed (perhaps I should say ‘self-anointed’) elite think themselves massively superior to all others, justifying for instance their having incomes 40 or 50 times higher than those at the bottom of the scale. The player this morning who felt himself so far above me, and who was playing with my friend, clearly regards his game as massively better than mine. In reality, it’s little more than marginally better than mine. 

OK, decidedly more than marginally better. But no more than that.

So I was delighted as I left the court and walked past his to hear the score. 14-1. To the other side. Despite the fact that he was playing with a good partner.

I was sorry for my friend but absolutely delighted for his partner. Couldn’t happen to a better guy, I felt.

Pure Schadenfreude, of course, pleasure in another’s misfortune, and therefore reprehensible. But its being reprehensible didn’t make it any less enjoyable. I left the club with a song in my heart and a spring in my step, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.

It's still a pleasure even if you just think you're enjoying it

‘What is all this swimming business?’ a friend asks me, after reading my latest dirge on how ghastly the whole experience is.

Well, I should perhaps set the record straight. It isn’t, in reality, anything like as bad as the impression I may have given of it. In fact, there are occasions when I derive great enjoyment from ploughing up and down the pool. Even at one of those horrifying times of day when the only kind of water that seems remotely attractive is the kind that fills a steaming bath, and even that prospect barely tempts one away from a sheet and a toast-warm duvet.

Just the other day, the pleasure practically tipped into triumph. I was racing up and down the pool, eating away the lengths as though there was no tomorrow, far more quickly than on any yesterday. I was achieving a staggering increase in pace. OK, I knew that the kind of speed I was managing was probably little better than what you might call sedate, but that was a huge step up from my usual performance, best described as downright laggardly.

In fact, the improvement was so colossal that it did occur to me to wonder whether it could be real. But I drove that unworthy thought away and enjoyed the pleasure of the moment. Isn’t that what the best philosophers always recommend?

Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday, why fret about them if today be sweet?

So I rose from the pool, shoulders squared, chest puffed out, full of my sense of accomplishment. Only then did I notice that the partition, which usually splits our 50 metre pool at the 32 metre mark, had been placed bang on the centre point.

I stood stupidly staring at this chastening evidence of my own vainglory.

The pool had been super-short. I’d been racking up the lengths, but they were just over two-thirds of my normal ones. Even a swimming-atrophied brain at a mind-numbing time could work out that far from achieving anything out of the ordinary, my performance had been right down there in the bargain basement I generally inhabit. There’d been no improvement at all.

No, it wasn't me.
However much I'd have liked to believe it was

So it turned out that the one time my swimming gave me tangible pleasure, it turned out to be entirely illusory.

But, hold on, that’s not really right, is it? It was the perception on which my enjoyment was based that was illusory. The pleasure itself was genuine. Now that’s got to be worth celebrating.

After all, how many of the pleasures we enjoy have any stronger basis?

When things are going swimmingly and only the coin is terrifying

I may not be crazy about swimming, but persisting in going at awful o’clock in the morning does seem to be revealing a surprising streak of craziness in me. 

One of the delights of early morning swimming, and there are so few I make the most of any I find, is trying to decide exactly what’s grimmest about the experience. And, funnily enough, it turns out not to be getting up at 6:00 a.m.

Nor is it that terrible moment when you’re half into the water but haven’t quite let yourself slip beyond the point of no recovery, so you could still, in principle, change your mind and climb back up the ladder. That’s pretty ghastly, because it’s the instant when every nerve at last realises that it’s true, that your wayward mind is really going to do that terrible thing, again, and immerse the whole of your protesting body in that frightful wet stuff.

But it isn’t that. It isn’t even the moment when I realise that I’ve left something crucial – towel, goggles, shampoo – in the locker and have to reopen it with the consequent loss of the 20 pence coin I dropped in the slot to lock it.

No, it’s that 20p coin itself. This has become the terrible, obsessive object of all my fears as I prepare for early morning swims.The 20p bit haunts my thoughts.

The humble 20p bit. The stuff of obsessional nightmare

Not, you understand, for any inherent value of its own. Why, it wouldn’t buy much more than 10% of a large latte. In fact, if you take your coffee in more fashionable establishments than I frequent, it wouldn’t cover even that. 

What concerns me is not the value it represents, but its value as an object in itself. 

Our swimming pool has lockers that will only accept those coins. Two tens? Out of luck, pal. Four fives? You must be joking. Ten twos? A suggestion not even worth dignifying by a refusal.

It’s odd, though. I’ve forgotten lots of things when going swimming but never, as it happens, a 20p bit. But the fear of doing so never leaves me.

Come to think of it, that may be the reason I always remember to bring one.

In any case, even if I didn’t, the fee for Danielle and me leaves us with a 20p coin in the change. And, as often as not, the receptionist asks us if we need one anyway.

On one occasion, I did turn up without my coin purse. I know, I know, coin purses are deeply unfashionable, please don’t think I haven't been told, but they are convenient when you’re sick of clinking coins around in your pocket.

My apprehension was intense when I forgot mine. How was I going to be able to overcome the terrible obstacle I’d created for myself?

‘Your change and your tickets,’ said the receptionist.

And there lying in my hand, small, shiny and apparently winking at me in good cheer, was one of those funny little seven-sided not-quite-silver coins. The relief was overwhelming. Which just made me feel stupid.

Especially as, when I came to put my possessions into my rucksack, preliminary to dumping them in the locker, I found several more 20p pieces in its front pocket. Where I’d put them as a reserve, just in any case I ever did what I’d done that morning and left without my change.

It made me wonder just how crazy swimming was making me. Until I remembered that I’d put the coins in my bag one morning at about 8:00, when I’m tolerably rational. And I’d worked myself into a panic over their absence before 7:00, when I’m certainly anything but. Perhaps I can put the whole embarrassingly dumb behaviour pattern down to time of day.

After all, we don’t call it stupid o’clock for nothing.

Exercise: it's just a gamble

There’s something wonderful about being in a swimming pool at 7:00 in the morning.

At least, I’m assured there is. I haven’t actually found the wonder yet, and I’ve been looking for some weeks now. Compared to an alternative, like say a warm bed, or even a real bath – the kind you don’t have to swim in – the wonderful aspect isn’t always immediately obvious.

Wow. Such a long way. And so wet. Particularly daunting at 7:00.

It leaves you feeling good all day, they tell me. There’s probably some truth in that, though I find it also leaves me smelling of chlorine. I’ve even taken to showering twice but that smell, it just clings.

In any case, what’s the good of saying it feels better afterwards? You think that’s convincing? Isn’t it what they say about banging your head against a brick wall? Feels great when you stop?

There must be something else. It occurs to me that it may just be one of those age-old traditions, practised by flagellant monks or pilgrims whipping themselves on the way to Kerbala: mortifying the flesh to exalt the spirit. It works too: having spent a while in the pool at silly o’clock certainly leaves me filled with that emotion, right up there with the most glorious we enjoy, self-righteousness.

I imagine those monks and pilgrims inflicting pain on themselves feel just the same.

Of course, the reality is that we don’t do this terrible violence to bodies that would far rather be pampered, for the sake of our souls. We do it for the sake of the bodies themselves. I realise that on the face of it, that doesn’t seem to make much sense: you just have to realise it’s a gamble.

The assumption is that we’re in for pain, one way or another.

One option is that we get it now in small doses, out there running across rough country to get to places we’re not interested in reaching; in a gym lifting stupidly heavy weights off the ground only to put them down again (or even worse, driving a rowing machine: it’s bad enough in a boat, but the machines don’t even move, and would sink if you tried to get them to); or indulging in the form of exercise I now seem to have adopted, ploughing up and down a pool, only to reach the other end and discover it looks pretty well the same as the one you’ve just left, and exactly the same as it looked when you were there two lengths ago.

The other option is that we let the old joints and arteries go and get all our pain in a much bigger dose in a few years time.

So the bet is that all the little bits of pain now will add up to less than all the terrible pain we might avoid – or at least push back – later. It’s the gamble I’m taking.

But, I tell you what: if in a few years I find myself dying of some ghastly condition all this exercise should have prevented, I shall be most put out. And thinking, all the way to grave, ‘what the hell! Why didn’t I lie in late a bit more often – and eat more chocolate?’