On Thursday

I believe I know why every time I start to blog again after a long period of blissful silence, it will be about the swimming pool.

There must be something about sitting in freezing water in near-nuddy that brings out the worst in people. It appears that the water is arbitrary for adolescents, who contrive to make as much noise as possible in large groups anywhere. The effect is, however, amplified when they are all clumped together in an echoing changing chamber and laugh like hyenas.

A whole bloody pack of hyenas, screeching about the current fashion and brands of lipstick at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

The pool itself was safe from them. Deep water halted their advance like nothing else, as the serious swimmers hogged the lanes and the torrid teenagers had nowhere to clump. So they retreated to shallower places to make a nuisance of themselves – but the competition pool has perils of its own.

Take the elderly people out for their morning swim. Huge old ladies floated about peacefully like displaced logs in floral swimsuits. Occasional mutterings of Hokkien could be heard as they communed with each other disparagingly of the sun and the absent sea. A brown old man with muscles that would have made Michaelangelo bash David to pieces in despair bounced cheerily at one end and consequently disappeared from my knowledge, while others of comparable age (though not physique, alas!) hauled themselves in a determined fashion back and forth the length of the pool.

Not all of them were competent swimmers, although no one drowned. In one incident where I was halfway down the pool, my goggles had fogged so that I could only see a rather round old guy coming straight at me from the opposite direction at the distance of about three strokes away. So I turned to avoid him. He also turned, but in the same direction! I swear the sod was trying his best to run into me. It so happened that I was capable of some acrobatics underwater to avoid him, but he contrived to come close enough that a boll of water ran up my leg: unless you’ve had the same thing happen to you, you will have no idea how PISSED I was. I kicked my way past (my foot connected with nothing [sigh]) and concentrated on creating silent torture techniques while I rowed myself to the other end of the pool. I can only hope that this incident was because the man was half-blind or just an inept swimmer, and not because he was an old perv.

Further danger came in the form of a flotilla of small children struggling across the pool in soggy pyjamas. One small child is capable of a surprisingly firm kick in the face, or flicking spray just when you’re coming up for air. A whole horde of them learning the front crawl is murder for anyone unfortunate enough to be in the near vicinity. The little darlings were still using floats and obviously have no idea how to steer yet, so all they could do – and did – was to kick very hard and hope for the best, and they went at it with an enthusiasm that would make a bullfight look like a tea party. By ten-o-five the whole place was flooded with packs of similar swim-groups, and I decided that enough was enough; I quit the pool while limbs, nerves and sinuses were still intact. Next time, I decided, I should go earlier.

This happened on Thursday, by the way, which was the same day as when a nice friend treated me to Seoul Garden. We went to Sunplaza park and ate dried mangoes, and it rained.

Monsoon rains are terrible. The whole sky would be overcast and sunny at the same time so that we are lulled into complacency, and when it finally does rain, it occurs without warning. The weather went from pleasantly breezy to torrential tropical storm in a matter of half a minute. And it so happened that on that particular day, of all days, I HAD FORGOTTEN TO BRING AN UMBRELLA.

But that was on Thursday.