Important things!

¡AVISO IMPORTANTE! There it was in the lift this morning! I spotted it when I went out for a run. It wasn’t there last night when we returned home at around 10.00 pm. An IMPORTANT NOTICE! All about the swimming pool. The pool will be open from 10.00 to 22.00. At 22.00 the gate to the pool will be padlocked!

That sounds a bit draconian. Bang go my plans for a nine o’ clock swim!

What has provoked this? Have naughty people been having poolside parties? Or has the hot weather simply got to people to such an extent that some have taken advantage of having a pool in the garden to go and swim or just stand in the water in the late evening?

It has to be said that as the summer has gone on, and particularly as the heatwave continued, the water in the pool has not been at its best. Not what you might call crystalline. In the morning it’s not been bad but by early evening it’s been in a pretty parlous state, murky, not to say turgid! It must be all the sun creams washing off in the water but the children who play games throwing small plastic rings into the water and then diving in to find and retrieve them must have had some difficulty seeing the rings on the bottom of the pool.

There have been rumblings and grumblings about the filters not working properly and the pressure of the water which splashes in at one end not being up to standard. And on more than one occasion I have been in conversation with a technician who comes and checks things and chlorinates the water. He moans about the grass being cut and left to lie, so that it is blown and walked into water, and the numbers of people who think the shower is there to rinse the chlorine off you when you get out of the pool rather than to wash the dust and stuff off you before you get in!

Personally, I would campaign for people to have to tie back long hair. There is something quite off-putting about swimming along and realising that you have somebody else’s long black hair tangled around your fingers - only a single hair, not a whole headful, but even so! There’s a chap who arrives at the pool with his hair in a man-bun, not my favourite male hairstyle but at least tidy and under control. Preparing for a swim, he releases the man-bun, shakes out his glossy locks and there you are, a few more hairs to clog up the filter!

Anyway, by the time I returned from my run this morning, somebody had scrawled a response to the notice, a nicely printed notice by the way, signed by the president of the comunidad and everything. In large letters, in scratchy-looking ballpoint pen, someone demanded to know when and where and by whom that decision had been taken.

A little bit of indignant reaction there!

I now wait to see if there will be a response to the response, a whole correspondence on the walls of the lift. Is this the start of the Torres Doralta (our flats) pool wars?

Out in the wider world, here is another bit of craziness. Beyoncé has been talking about how she is descended from a slave-owner, who did what a lot of slave-owners did and had a child by one of his slaves. It sounds a little as though she was rather surprised at this. Surely she is not the first mixed race American to discover exactly that bit of family history.

What surprised me, however, was the rest of her reaction; “I researched my ancestry recently and learned that I come from a slaveowner who fell in love with and married a slave,” she said. “I had to process that revelation over time. I questioned what it meant and tried to put it into perspective. I now believe it’s why God blessed me with my twins. Male and female energy was able to coexist and grow in my blood for the first time. I pray that I am able to break the generational curses in my family and that my children will have less complicated lives.”

Apparently she feels that her family has a “lineage of broken male-female relationships, abuse of power, and mistrust”. But her twins, Rumi and Sir, will be able to put all of that right. That’s why God gave her the twins!

Well, hooray!

I suppose if you live your life in the public eye you have to have such ideas.

But oh, what a responsibility for the poor children!