Desperately seeking Moby

Ploughing up and down the pool today, I tried to distract myself from the sheer misery. After musing on the decadence of a society which requires artificial exercise to keep us fit (i.e. sedentary lives, excessive food, powered transport), I comforted myself with the thought that one day, I'll be able to stop swimming, once I reach a theoretical level of fitness.

That thought kept me going for about 3 metres before I realised that given the rest of my life, I wouldn't actually be stopping other than for Death. Who isn't much good at the backstroke. Then I took to contemplating how many lengths I'd have to complete before I visit the Undiscovered Country (that's Hamlet, folks, and also the subtitle of Star Trek VI, not one I'd recommend).

So here goes. If I stick to my current diet of 50 lengths twice a week for roughly 46 weeks of the year, that's 2300 lengths per year. At a guess, I'll live until 85 unless Grant Shapps and Paul Uppal send the boys round. So that's another 48 years, or 110, 400 lengths to go. Multiply that by 25 to get 2, 760, 000 metres, and divide by 100 to arrive at a grand total of 27,600 kilometres left to swim. By TOUTATIS I want to give up now.

So how long will it take? I'm getting a bit faster, but soon I'll decline into senile decrepitude, so I'm averaging out my speed at 38 minutes per 50 lengths. That's 72 minutes per week or 55 hours twenty minutes per year. So basically I spend over two days per year doing something I entirely detest. Over the rest of my life, I'm going to spend just over 2649 hours or 110 days mindlessly dragging my pasty, bulging carcass up and down through other swimmers' urine in fruitless pursuit of a youth I never actually had.

Still, at least nobody will shout 'you fat bastard' at me on the street anymore.

I was doing so well too…

Damn it, I've just fallen off the book wagon. I've bought relatively few recently - 2/3 per week instead of ten (currently reading Norman Davies's very interesting Vanished Kingdoms (though I'm not sure what to get out of it beyond fascination other than awareness that all states are temporary) and just finished Jonathan Coe's funny, emotional The House of Sleep), but having a bad day's teaching yesterday, combined with a trip to the bookshop to buy a birthday present, meant that temptation was too strong.

It's all comfort reading: volume 1 of Matthews and Sweeney's very faithful graphic adaptation of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (which might come in useful in several modules), P. D. James's Pride and Prejudice murder mystery Death Comes To Pemberley (despite not being too happy handing cash over to a Tory peer and despite this hilarious negative review), and on the recommendation of friends, Wodehouse's Leave it to Psmith, one of his Blandings novels.

I went for a swim today. It was enough to make me consider voting Tory, even for the Egregious Uppal. Thanks to the massive cuts in school sports budgets and free swimming for old people, I had an entire 25-metre municipal pool all to myself. In this case, we certainly weren't all in it together. I was in it, and they weren't. Though I wasn't in it in the altogether. Ugh.

This is how the week ends: not with a bang, but a whimper

Well, my neat list of things to do today failed immediately.

The lettings agent who was meant to inspect my flat at 11 turned up at 11.30. She took pictures and carefully didn't listen to my (short, reasonable) list of problems with the flat. So I had to take her hostage.

That meant I missed my pre-meeting meeting. And then my meeting. But I did make it to the Guardian Higher Education live chat about balancing research and teaching. And despite Music For Deckchair's teasing, I was thoughtful, calm and reasonable. Probably. I managed to juggle that with marking a Shakespeare online forum. They were very impressive, though I will give them a hint: this is a quarto and this is a Quattro. Try not to mix them up again.

After that, it was a deeply unpleasant plunge into the swimming pool after a couple of weeks away - not a joyful return, but after doing drleehw's survey on self-image and eating habits, I decided to skip the usual Lard Sarnie for lunch and do some exercise instead. No doubt I'll feel the benefit later in life, but right now I'm mostly feeling bitter and resentful. Good job it's the weekend.

Go Swimming, See The Sights

What could be more picturesque than a naked man drying all his genital crevices under the wall-mounted hand-dryer?

Google appears to lack illustrative images. Yes, I'm sad too.

Meanwhile, on the way back from swimming, some spectacularly arrogant driving inspired a new marketing slogan, which I'm happy to licence to Range Rover and other companies, perhaps accompanying a picture of a child in crosshairs.

Oddly, Google fails to provide an appropriate image for that too, but here's one I made earlier.

Because let's face it: hit a kid in a tin can and she might bounce off alive. Smack her with a 4 ton brick carrying one person and an iPhone and it's Game Over.

Must eat…

They've now painted my floor pink. Like a veal chop. Or human flesh. Between that and the Cadbury's Chocolate colour of the ground floor, I think about food from the moment I get to work, which isn't good for a fat bastard such as myself.

I was effortlessly put down in the pool today. I managed my 60 lengths in a decent enough time, and apologised to the lady with whom I shared the lane for drifting over. As we chatted, she mentioned that she'd 'only' done 160 lengths but was getting bored. I resisted the temptation to hold her head under the water, largely because she could probably hold her breath for longer than it would take me to weaken.

Sink or swim?

The answer, according to David Cameron, is sink:

Another cut worth noting is free swimming for those aged under 16 and over 60, which sits oddly with the public health agenda, and the efforts to encourage more people to get active in the run up to the Olympics.

Free swimming programmes will end this summer.

I don't know whether this scheme encouraged more people to swim, or simply paid for those who would already have swum. Cutting it seems a bit petty though - fit people cost the NHS less, which why you should all stop smoking.

I took up swimming because I was a fat bastard. It's cheap with my monthly payment of £12 for unlimited swimming, against £3.60 per visit at full price. Now I'm merely a portly bastard and once my sunburn goes, I'll once again be a portly-becoming-sylphlike bastard.

Of course, some Tory MPs charged the taxpayer to clean their private pools, so I'm surprised that they don't see why anyone else should benefit from Government subsidy.

I Am The Thorpedo

Back to the pool today, after 6 weeks off from illness and stuff. What a humiliation. I lasted 25% of my usual time and 20% of my habitual distance before retiring exhausted. I powered through the water with all the force and aquatic grace of a delinquent butterfly, yet everything aches. It's going to be a long way back…

Aims for today are to finish marking the interesting MA dissertation ('the body in sporting fiction') and to write my piece for the subject centre. And to avoid lovely fattening foods.

Aren't children creepy?

They certainly were today, anyway.

I go swimming three times a week, and on Friday, a load of 9 year-olds (possibly, I can't tell anymore) are changing into their togs as I'm leaving. Usually, they're boisterous: loud, laughing and chaotic. Their teacher is a soi-disant cool guy, and he's normally quite chatty too.

Not today. It felt like The Midwich Cuckoos. They came in, changed and headed off to the pool in total silence. No shuffling, no whispering, no laughter, no instructions from their teacher or requests to him. They lined up and marched off as though they were all being controlled by some central intelligence. Very disconcerting.

Not waving but drowning

Good Morning Campers, Hi-de-hi! That's what I felt like last week as I traipsed round an enclosed Welsh campus making sure everyone was happy - wearing livid yellow.

I went swimming today, for the first time in two weeks. It was neither pleasant nor reassuring - fully five minutes slower on my 1500 metres than previously. Shameful. Bits of me finished each lap several metres behind…

Yo!

Hello everybody. What did you all do with your Bank Holiday Monday, those of you in the UK, at least. I went home to be in the bosom of my family - the two married siblings, my youngest sister, parents and grandmother, and mostly read and ate. Happy 49th to my uncle Peter too! Before I departed the Potteries, I also called in on Anita, who has quit the boredom of Dublin and previously New York for the giddy heights of Stoke-on-Trent. Hope she can cut it in the land of Arnold Bennett, Dinah Craik and Stanley Matthews.

I notice, for all you football fans (soccer to the Irish and American readers) that Stoke are in the Europa League places, and for a few sweet hours, were in a Champions League qualification spot. Still, it's early days.

I'm not in for long today - a union negotiation meeting this afternoon, then home to pack all my polyester clothing for 5 days at the UK School Games, which start on Friday. I get to go down tomorrow and the athletes arrive later. It's going to be exhausting, challenging and enormous fun. I'll try to post sometimes, but if it's anything like last year, the day starts at 6 a.m. and finishes at 2 a.m. so I may not be too coherent. It's a whole week off swimming too, which isn't good for my shapeliness.

Ma dawg gone left me

I hate country music. Rhinestones, whining, reactionary lyrics. That's what I thought anyway. Turns out that loads of the music I like is country - bluegrass, Appalachian stuff, some Loretta Lynn, lots of Johnny Cash and today, the Diana Jones album I bought a few days ago, Better Times Will Come. I can't pretend it's folk or any other sub-genre, despite the presence of good violins. It's country, and it's great. There, I said it.

However, I will remove my ears with a grater rather than ever listen to Country'n'Irish.

My bike looks ace now: bright blue handlebar tape, bright blue tyres, gleaming chrome and almost working brakes. Perhaps tomorrow I'll go for a ride before work. I swam today - felt pretty good until Neal appeared, did his 40 lengths in 20 minutes and still looked fresher than me. The fencing season's over until September, which is a little frustrating, though really it's too hot to put on four layers of kit, some of them metal.

I just need to unload

I've seen some strange things today (and yesterday).

The Waterstones notice above the cycling books reading 'Peddle Power' - I don't think it was a sophisticated joke about selling cycling books.

Also on cycling-related matters, I treated myself to new handlebar tape, lights, lock and pump today. I didn't choose the lights available for £423.99! Now, I love cycling gadgetry. My ultimate bike is the Moulton New Series Double Pylon (c. £10,000) though any Moulton would be heaven. I have a 196os Moulton F-Frame (not my bike pictured) which needs serious restoration by an expert before I can ride it and an old Viscount racer which Neal's done up for me. But. Almost £500 for a set of lights. That's not rational.

Outside the bike shop, a man listens to a radio pressed to his ear. A silent radio. They're coming, you know.

Finally, some etiquette advice. If you go into a local pub in the UK, you don't take the stool at the end of the bar. It belongs to someone called Bob, even if he's not there. Even if you've been coming to this pub for 10 years. Even if Bob's dead. It's his place. Likewise at the swimming pool, there's a system called queuing, which is a fair way of providing space according to the order in which people arrive. I've been swimming three times a week for a year now, so I'm not Bob, but I know who the Bobs are. They arrive early, queue and wait patiently, swim in a stately fashion and nobody gets in their way.

Today, we were all patiently waiting for the 11 o'clock shift. At 11.55, two women walk in and go straight to the front. They object to waiting until 11 and stay at the head of the queue. Then when they appear in the pool, they hog a lane to themselves. Which is fine, if they're going to use it. But they don't. I did my 44 lengths in the time they took to do 7, in between a lot of chatting and standing around in such a way that nobody else could use it. Selfish gits. Sorry, it's really annoyed me: public amenities should be used with regard for the needs of others - it's how community works.

Oh yes, the other weird thing. Listening to the posh bloke (Ed Stourton) on Radio 4's Today programme, playing and discussing Slayer. Apparently the band's very popular amongst US soldiers as a soundtrack to killing Iraqis.

The Mailbox Always Beeps Twice

I mailed some of you personally this morning (that's how many readers I have): you won't have received it because outgoing e-mail is down and likely to be so for several hours. Brilliant.

I've just returned from swimming - 30% slower today thanks to the pain and stiffness incurred during yesterday's fencing marathon, but the swim helped. As did the toasted bacon and egg sandwich at Jay's afterwards.

The Map Twats apparently had a good time in North Wales - drinking whiskey all night round a camp fire waiting for the solstice. Apart from James, an early lightweight casualty.

A Friday Friday conundrum this time

It's so late! Sorry everybody, I've had a load of work to do, and I got caught up in the Guardian's Readers Recommend shenanigans - see if you can work out who I am, as I've picked a different username for reasons that now escape me. I'm around page 7.

So anyway, I was wallowing up and down in the pool with all the grace of an escaped bouncy castle, and wondered why I was doing this - the answer, of course, is so that I can slave away for some of you for an extra few years rather than gratefully accepting the massive heart-attack which was pencilled in for about 2015. So today's question is:

What do you do unwillingly, because they're good for you, or because others expect it of you?

(Were it not swimming, I could put 'turn up for work', though actually when things are going well, it's brilliant). I also go to Mass at Christmas with the family simply for a quiet life, and (this may amaze you), I often shut up when internally I'm screaming with fury and have something very offensive to say. My PGCE colleagues called me Mr Angry, which seems most unfair.

People are weird

I went back to the pool today, for the first time in a week and a half - the carcass was complaining and I was a full two minutes slower than usual. There was a certain pleasure in being the first person to disturb the limpid waters, though my habitual impersonation of a drowning rhinoceros was perhaps not the most elegant of entries.

I had quite a strange experience afterwards though. Here's an image you'll find difficult to shift. While I was hosing myself down, a guy I vaguely know from the university stopped to tell me he'd dreamed about me last night. This is the second time a relative stranger has said this to me recently. He did make it clear that my nakedness wasn't part of his dream, which consisted of seeing me crash my skateboard outside Wolverhampton's central library. I've never been on a skateboard, don't frequent that particular institution, and certainly don't feature in this guy's life enough to impinge on his subconscious!

I'm largely uninterested in dreams - random fragments of the subconscious. I only ever dream about being shouted at, during times of stress like the marking period. What's your interpretation of this one though?

Take the skinheads bowling, take them bowling

I went bowling last night with my housemates and assorted nerds from the computational linguistics department. Very charming nerds they are too.

The bowling was surprisingly good fun. Turns out it's not simply what teenagers do before they can get served in pubs. My performance veered between atrocious and surprisingly good, though what made the difference, I don't know! I was later humiliated at air hockey by a computational linguist who shares a hairdresser with Fellaini (no skinhead he)!

Anyway, today's a big day. My fourth sister (youngest of the six of us) is 23 today, I went for a fast swim even though tendonitis is turning my hand into a hook, and I'm being observed by my PGCE mentor while I offer individual tutorials to 1st-year English students. Must practice caring voice (especially after a colleague described a recent piece I wrote as 'sarcastic… dripping with contempt'). Does that sound like harmless little me?

Tomorrow is full of cultural delights - primarily the cheese boat calls at Norbury Junction, a light walk, then the Little Civic for some fine lo-fi.

My poor abused corpse

I went swimming this morning, for the first time in over a week, a week in which I've overindulged in chocolate, alcohol and rare breeds. So as you can imagine, the session was purest torture. My stomach appeared to be trailing several yards behind the rest of me. Plus, it was all in vain, as Neal and I had to eat a cake to take away the taste of the atrocious 'vegetable' 'lasagne' served in the canteen today. Quality is hit-and-miss here; some things are delicious, others inedible. Today erred on the side of the lower order of existence.

Still, at least some fun stuff turned up in the post: The Thick of It Specials, the new Super Furry Animals album, and Bill Callahan's Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle.

Mighty meaty

6 massive, blue duck-eggs. 2 pheasants. 1 partridge. Rare breed black pudding. Gloucester Old Spot bacon, 2 ham hocks, 1 formerly wild Barbary duck. All dead. Dead Tasty! Tonight the Atkins diet begins. Luckily swimming starts again on Friday.

Aquarage

Queue-jumping Smoker appears to have invited his friends to the pool party: a stream of them pushed in today. I'm going to start drowning them soon. Their atrophied lungs presumably aren't up to much more than 10 seconds underwater. At least the rage is keeping my heart rate up.

Don't mind me, sometimes I get a little cranky

I like people. Most people. Some people, anyway. What I'm trying to say is that I'm not an undiscriminating misanthrope. There are groups with a permanent place in my Top Ten for Summary Execution - Tories, hippies, SUV-drivers. I'd like a t-shirt to flash reading 'you are an arrogant, selfish, polluting, greedy, egotistical, inadequate, shortsighted bastard (unless you're a farmer or builder)' but fear that they wouldn't be able to read the whole thing as they flash past en route between suburban home and suburban prep school. 

So anyway, apart from them, I like most people. Except for the three teenage girls who casually dropped their fast food wrappings on the floor in front of me as though there's no more natural place for rubbish - inconceivable to them that bins even exist, let alone should be used by the likes of them. 

No, the only person who really got to me today is a complete stranger I see every Monday. I queue up to get into the pool, so I'm already feeling slightly cranky. Waiting my turn, I idly gaze out over the car park where he sits in his highly-polluting car, warming up for his swim by having a cigarette. So he's driven to the pool and smokes as a preliminary. I want to smash his headlights in and then calmly explain that a walk and no cigarette would help him no end, and would leave the congested lanes for people who don't intend to poison themselves (and others), before dying expensively on the NHS. OK, so he's finished his cancer-twig. Then, EVERY WEEK, he strolls to the front of the queue and pushes in so aggressively that nobody says a thing. After that, he races to get changed first, grabs the widest lane and swims down the middle so that nobody else can share it. 

The final straw was after I left the pool today. Trying to cross the ring-road, who should shoot straight through the red light while I was on the road but this utter, utter wanker. At least I'm compensated by the knowledge that a fat smoker, dangerous driver and non-seatbelt wearer is probably going to die younger than me. Does that make me a bad person?

Urge to kill… rising.