Sunday = swimming

Here is one of my swimming pools at sunset yesterday. Today the clocks sprung forward so this evening it shut while it was still light.

The French are pretty good when it comes to swimming pool etiquette... everyone showers, for instance, and the other day a boy said, Excuse me, Sir, when he was about to jump into my patch of the deep end. One thing that I cannot abide, though, is when people who have been larding in the shallow end of your lane push off just as you are coming in to turn. They are always slow swimmers, too. It's the aquatic equivalent of a 2CV pulling out of a side-road into the path of a decent Jag. This happens all the time out here and today yielded a bumper crop of such moments. I like to go for the accidental crack in the ribs as I overtake.

Not that I would want to compare my arms-only front crawl to 5th gear in a Jaguar, but I am getting quicker. I've gone up another notch on my belt and I've pretty much worn out my trunks; a problem exacerbated by my 2nd pet peeve:

In all the French pools I've visited, they have a way of keeping a wet side and a dry side with changing cubicles that have two doors. One door from the exterior and dry side, the other leading to the showers and pools. Once on the wet side you have to be in swimwear. I'm not a fan of cubicles in the first place because when you're 6'3 it's quite a mission to dry properly when crammed into a wardrobe. But the corollary of the wet/dry dichotomy is that once you've changed, you've got no way of washing the chlorine out of your trunks because the basins are on the wet side.

Suffice to say my jammers are really reaching their limit. They've gone very thin which makes them mostly see-through at the rear and unfortunately (for most) massively clingy at the front. Problem is, I've not seen a single pair of trunks like mine either for sale or at the pool which means as soon as they completely disintegrate there's only one thing for it... going French.