Poolside reflections!

Today has been a day of blue sky and sunshine with a predicted (and achieved) high os 26 degrees and a 0% chance of rain, a perfectly good day. So in the late morning I went down to the pool, where a young woman, well, younger than me at any rate, was busy working on her tan, and a couple of probably my age were walking round, telling me that they were not going in the water but were getting some exercise. I am not convinced that slow walking round the pool constitutes better exercise than actually swimming up and down in the water but that’s their business, not mine. 

Nobody else was there. Where were all the children who live in the two blocks of flats? Goodness knows. Perhaps their parents work and they have been shipped off to be looked after by grandparents. Perhaps they are all down at the beach. The two towers have quite extensive gardens at the back, with a children’s playground as well as the swimming pool, but I rarely see children playing there. Are they all indoors playing electronic games?

Not that I was complaining about the emptiness of the pool, far from it. It’s rather like having your own private pool and being able to plough up and down undisturbed, if ploughing is the correct term for the rather pedestrian breast stroke I perform, is quite a privilege, not to say a luxury.

I had a bit of a chat with a lady of Italian extraction whom I have got to know poolside over the last few years. I had wondered why I had not seen her this year as she has usually been down at the pool every morning, gradually turning a deeper and deeper shade of brown. The crutch she was leaning on explained it all; she had had a hip-replacement operation two months ago and was healing far more slowly than she liked. The previous hip had been replaced seven years ago and then she had been walking normally after about three weeks. This one was taking much longer, possibly down to her simply being seven years older she suggested ruefully, and she was finding it very frustrating.
She missed her bathing. Getting into the pool fine but getting out was a major problem, even with her husband assisting. Not good! And so she sits around more than she likes, compounding the problem by putting weight on. I thank my lucky stars not to have such things going on in my life!

When the pool is busier it is a good place for people-watching. There is usually a fine selection piercings and tattoos to observe. I must go down at some point equipped with my distance glasses so that I can read the vast amount of written material some people have on their arms, shoulders and backs. Quite why anyone would choose to adorn themselves in that way continually escapes me. However, I suppose it is their business and I try to keep an open mind about such things.

Similarly I try to be open-minded about what people wear to the pool or the beach. Perhaps they find my rather plain one-piece swimsuit not very summery but I am British after all. I see women in their fifties squeezed into bikinis that probably fitted them properly twenty years ago. The young men favour those loose and floppy swimming shorts, which are fine, but there is one elderly chao who might once have cut a dash in his speedos and still tries to do so, unfortunately with rather too much portly chest, aka belly, on show. His choice! I draw the line, however, at bikinis bottoms that are little more than thongs, revealing altogether too much buttock to all the world. Some parts of the anatomy really should not be on show to the public when are past the age of three years. And besides, do you really want to suffer sunburn on your sit-upon?

That’s almost enough pool-side reflections. So here is something equally pointless, this time about eyebrows:
“It is one of nature’s cruellest jokes: by the time we are old enough to be entrusted with eyebrows, we have often already ruined them. The effects of improper eyebrow maintenance in our teenage years may last a lifetime; a battlefield massacre you see reflected back at you every time you look in the mirror.

But even into adulthood, eyebrow-related mishaps may occur. This week, the Sun reported that 37-year-old Colline Rees from Llanelli, south Wales, had a family holiday ruined after a botched eyebrow treatment left her too embarrassed to pose for photos. After a trainee therapist accidentally waxed off most of her right eyebrow, the salon attempted to fix the mistake by painting thick, black dye on Rees’s brows. “All my close friends and family were saying I look like something out of the Angry Birds,” Rees said.”

I can sympathise. When I have my hair colour sorted I usually go along afterwards to what is laughingly called a “brow bar” and have my eyebrows threaded - an odd practice involving a piece of cotton thread to remove excess eyebrow hairs. Every time I explain that I just need the brows tidying a little and each time they end up thinner than before. I fully expect them to disappear some time soon. It’s the same kind of thing as when you ask the hairdresser to just trim the split ends off your hair and you emerge with your hairstyle two inches shorter!

Life is full of such oddities. Another, to finish off, is something called “couvade syndrome” where the partner of a pregnant lady experiences all her symptoms - morning sickness, cravings, even weight gain. The oddest case of this was reported by a vet:

“A woman developed a variant of Couvade syndrome triggered by her dog’s pregnancy: she had all the symptoms of the syndrome, and she knew she was not pregnant.”

Now that is excessive!