Making An Effort

 

I went swimming last week.

I’ve not been swimming in years and I went on my own. I didn’t think anything of it until I told other people about it and they were genuinely impressed at the apparent amount of sacks it takes to do that. Well, I tell you, it wasn’t exactly a walk in the fucking palace garden.

No joke, I hate swimming baths, the dirty dirty cesspools that they are. Honest, even thinking about it makes me nearly dry boke.

You are RIGHT in there with him, you know? Swimming about in other peoples piss and shit.

I started to think “Hold on a fucking minute here Alanna, what are you DOING? You HATE swimming pools! You’ll look like a total arsehole in this swimming costume. Let’s leave, see if we can get our money back.” I didn’t listen to myself though. Essentially I need to lose a bit of weight and generally tone up a bit and swimming is supposed to be the best so….

I felt like everyone was looking at me and thinking “state o’ that!!!” but I ignored that feeling, showered and went into the water.

I can only do breaststroke but at first I couldn’t get a rhythm. People were gliding past me, hardly making a ripple in the water, then there was me splashing past like a total special case.

I felt as though the lifeguard was looking at me like, “state a her, she canny even do breaststroke hahaha!”.

I was in the water for about forty minutes. It took me 45 minutes (i think) to get my clothes back on. The cubicles are tiny, the woman in the one next to me must have thought I was trying to send her some sort of morse code message by the noise of me banging my fucking elbows off the sides. I worked up some sweat so I did.

I went to the hairdryer and started to use it. A woman with two wee girls came and put them up on the counter to brush their wee hair. I thought “check me hogging this hairdryer off they two wee lassies!” so I said to the woman “do you want to use this hairdryer for the girls?” – I was only trying to be nice but as soon as I said it the woman looked at me with a sort of terror as though I’d asked if she wanted me to beat them all to death with my hairbrush. She just said “oh no, they’ll be fine!”…no thanks or nothing. Cow.

Anyway, that was me. It was a fucking nightmare. I’m going back of course. Fuck.