I just started swimming lessons, because I can't swim and I want to. Not being able to swim can be really depressing.  Particularly on holidays.  Invariably my friends and I wade out into the water to impress the topless Swedish girls down the beach, but then we go too far and I can't keep my feet on the bottom any more so I have to turn back to go building sandcastles with 4 year olds.  Imagine how not like Baywatch that is.  Imagine how useless a cache of condoms is to me on holidays.  Imagine how impotent this makes a 26 year old feel. Especially when the topless Swedish girls come to take their 4 year old sisters away from the weird man making a shit of their sandcastles.

So I got a flash pair of swimming shorts, a Speedo swim cap and a pair of goggles that make me look like one of the Proclaimers, and I headed down to the pool.  Instantly I was reminded of the times I used to frequent the local swimming pool when I was about 8.  I went nearly every day during the summer, which leaves me at a total loss to explain my inability to swim.  I think I spent all my time messing, and chasing "young ones".  Yes, that was it......

I never had flash swimming shorts back then.  In fact I didn't have swimming shorts at all.  I used my jocks.  So did most of the other kids in Clara.  We all wore Y-fronts, of various colours.  But they made terrible swim shorts.  They turned transparent and clingy on contact with water.  Luckily none of us had any pubic hair at the time.  If you lunged suddenly out of the water for whatever reason, the Y-fronts would regularly remain behind, due to soddenness, and float embarrassingly around the pool like a cotton jellyfish.  This needs to happen only a few times until you learn to leave the pool with one hand firmly clutching your jocks.  Similarlily, if you jumped into the pool, you would effectively give yourself a wedgie, because you would rise back to the surface with your Y-fronts up around your ears.  In fact, to an onlooker, it would seem like you were wearing yours father's undergarments.  On one occasion I was.

And then there was pissing.  Pissing in the pool has to be one of the most satisfying experiences known to man, after driving really fast with your head out the window.  The satisfaction has a lot to do with the fact that nobody knows your doing this really "dirty" thing.  At least that used to be the case, until they introduced this chemical that goes purple when it reacts with urine.  Now if you piss in the pool, you'll be easily identifiable, as you'll be the one at the centre of the expanding pool of purple shame.  But, if you are caught unaware by a nature call, and you really do have to take a leak, try to do it right in front of those jets of water that they have every 4 or 5 meters down by the wall of the pool.  This will whisk the stream of urine away towards the centre of the pool, where it will rise as an anonymous purple cloud.  Unless some poor misfortunate happens to be standing where it surfaces and has to suffer the double trauma of knowing he is seeping in somebody elses wee AND everybody thinks he did it.  But, never mind that.  The most satisfying thing about peeing in the pool is the sensation of the stream of warmth around your groin, followed quickly by a return to your normal temperature.  Its a bit like a primitive form of massage I guess.

The whole poolside hygiene thing was always something I had great difficulty with.  One particularly hot summer, I hadn't washed for about 3 weeks, and I'd worn the same pair of blacks socks for so long that they had decomposed on my feet to add to the mass of dirt that was already there.  My mother sent me to the pool for a bath, so I went.  I stripped to my Y-fronts, dabbled breathlessly in the little foot disinfecting bath, and headed on my merry way with soot black feet.  I was on the verge of leaping in when a lifeguard came sprinting over and told me to get to hell back in there and clean my feet.  I told him, in my innocence, that I was just about to do that, but he nearly belted me.  So I hiked my jocks up in protest and stormed back to the dressing room.  Its only now, almost 20 years later, that I feel embarrassed about it.

So, if we weren't pissing or adjusting or jocks while in the pool, we were terrorising young women.  Tullamore is a big town about 7 miles from Clara, and at the time it didn't have a pool.  A lot of people came from Tullamore for a swim.  To an 8 year old from Clara, there was something very alluring about the foreign women from Tullamore.  They
spoke funny, some of them had tans, and they were better looking and swam better than the girls from Clara.  I guess the allure was down to a primal desire to strengthen the gene pool by mating with women from far off places.  Well, at 8, we weren't quite up to mating, so we contented ourselves instead with submerging ourselves and looking at their butts. I remember one poor girl, who was particularly alluring, turn around after her swim, to find a school of 8 year old perverts following in her wake.  She went mental and we all got out of the pool in such a hurry that every one of us left our jocks behind.

Anyway, I don't wear jocks any more in the pool.  I remember when I was about 11, I was reaching a stage of self consciousness and acquiring a small amount of fashion sense, I said "Mammy, everybody isn't wearing their underwear.  Look at that fella over there!"  To which Mammy replied, wearily "Thats right Michael - I think you've outgrown the Y-fronts".  That was the first time I felt like a man.  Next day I arrived down to the pool wearing a pair of paisley boxer shorts, and was the envy of the town.  I strutted over to one of the Tullamore girls and asked her if she was enjoying her holidays.