Swimming and thinking about my Dad

This morning was my last yoga class of the holiday; I have really loved it and I intend to sign up to a yoga class when I get home. My balance is terrible but I feel that I have improved over the two weeks at all the positions. I then made my way down to the sea and swam about watching the sailing boats and windsurfers, the bay looks so lovely with all the white sails against the dark blue sea and cloudless blue sky. I was thinking about my friend Ewan's blog post about his dislike of swimming and wondering why in contrast I love it so much. I think it can be traced back to my Dad and the way I learned to swim.

My Dad was the manager of the swimming pools in Glasgow as well as the laundries (previously the old steamies) and my sister and I learned to swim at Calder Street pool. I think I must have been taught well because I found it very pleasant. I remember being taught the breaststroke while lying on a float at the side of the pool, and then using a rubber ring to swim up and down while the instructor held it using a piece of rope attached to a stick, as if I was on the end of a fishing line. Soon I didn't need the rope and unbeknown to me the instructor let a little bit of air out of the rubber ring each time until he pointed out to me that there was no air in the ring at all - and there I was, swimming! (On reflection I must have been a very unobservant child not to have noticed him doing that!). On the way hime we used to stop for a "chittering bite" which was a bag of chips. So it was a good start, helped by the fact that every Sunday Jennifer and I went swimming by ourselves in a pool while our parents did the week's laundry next door - in those days the swimming pools were closed on a Sunday morning but of course my Dad had the keys! This was the truly excellent perk of my Dad's job. I remember when I was at my silly school some of the other girls sneering when they found out that my Dad was a swimming pool manager, which I suppose didn't sound as impressive as whatever their Dads were, probably lawyers or doctors, but I was very proud of him. It was actually a very big job, managing more than 500 staff in about thirty pools and laundries. He once told me that in his first couple of years as manager he saved Glasgow Corporation enough money to pay his salary and pension for more than his lifetime. On the other hand he had to work extremely hard to turn things around and in later life he often told me that he regretted not spending more time with Jennifer and me when we were small children. I always told him it was fine, that he had been a great Dad, but he was still sad about it. He used to refer to an incident when Jennifer and I were very young; we decided to make our own slide by putting a bit of wood against a fence and got an unfeasible amount of skelfs in our legs and bottoms. It took Mum days to remove them using bread poultices to draw them out, and a sterilised needle to remove the deepest ones. Dad said that he wished that he had built us a slide. I know how hard it is to get the balance right between work and home life but I respect how hard he worked to support us and he was a wonderful father. When I was a child I assumed that his job was hereditary and that one day I would work in my Dad's office in the City Chambers at his big polished desk! Not that he was always at his desk; he spent a lot of time out at the swimming pools and one of his favourite ways to check up on things was to slip quietly in to the establishment and go for a swim - the poolside staff had to be on their toes because they never knew when my Dad would come swimming up to them! Once he caught a group of staff pilfering and was reprimanding them when one of them made the mistake of saying, "Well, you can't sack all of us!" So he did sack all of them! He used to tell us all sorts of stories about his staff, such as the young man who was arrested for bigamy. When my Dad asked him why he did it he explained that his new girlfriend was pregnant so he wanted to do the right thing by her - which is kind of logical! Once a thief grabbed someone's purse in one of the laundries but he was caught quickly and all the women turned on him. They were a tough lot and he had to be rescued by the staff before the women actually killed him - they had already ripped all of his hair out.

On our Sunday morning trips to the swimming pool my Dad paid scant regard to health and safety rules - we were very young and completely unsupervised in the water! But the result was that we both ended up being very confident swimmers. I have never been a very fast swimmer but I am a strong one. However swimming in an indoors pool has never been my favourite venue; what I really love is swimming outdoors, whether in a pool or the sea. So I'm making the most of my swimming time this holiday, and this morning it was very pleasant to float around in the sea thinking about my lovely Dad, who also loved swimming in the sea.