Lots of people like to lounge by the pool on a Holiday weekend. But we have no pool and very little practice in lounging. So we were pleased to get an invitation from friends to come and lounge by their pool. The weather was warm, although perhaps not quite warm enough for such an outdoor extravagance. This, I thought, would be a challenge. The last time I lounged by a pool, as far as I can remember, was in 1966 at a cheap motel outside Phoenix, Arizona. I was stuck there for a week by car trouble, and the temperature was close to a hundred. The pool was the only alternative to sitting in front of a very feeble air conditioner. So I sat by the pool, and did my best to lounge. There is a faded photograph of me doing this, looking bored and discontented.
The trouble with lounging by a pool is that it offers very few distractions. There’s nothing to look at except a few thousand gallons of water that might be of more use to a farmer in California. Of course if there are bathing beauties it’s different, but these visions of bodily perfection rarely appear outside movies and magazines. Mostly we see just regular people at the pool, inadequately dressed. The sun hammers down on our vulnerable bodies, and I hear the phantom voice of my dermatologist saying: 'Remember what happened last time.'
Lounging turns out to be an acquired skill.Normally I am either sitting up or lying down, and if the latter I am asleep. Lounging is a kind of intermediate state, like limbo. The lounge chair forces an awkward posture, half sitting and half lying like a semi-resurrected corpse. If you rest your head back the sun hurts your eyes. If you force your head forward to read you get a pain in the neck.
However, the surroundings were beautiful: intense blues and greens, bird song, cicadas, the hum of subterranean pumps – a soporific combination. Time passed. The temperature climbed and I fell asleep, only to be woken by the siren song of all pool enthusiasts: 'Come on in, the water’s fine.'
You believe this only once in your life. I might have believed it when I was five years old, but years of icy pools and freezing bathing beaches have taught me wisdom. The water is never fine. At school we were taken for weekly swimming lessons at a pool that was so cold and so heavily chlorinated that it is amazing we weren’t bleached and killed by hypothermia at the same time. It was the period of the polio scare and the sensible thing would have been to keep kids out of pools altogether. But no we all had to learn swim, and even to dive. I would prefer this to be a repressed memory, but the smell of chlorine brings it back every time.
I never complain, so I sat by the pool, lounging as best I could, until it was time to go indoors and sit on proper chairs for much-needed refreshment. Well, it’s a good thing we’re all different. If we all enjoyed the same definition of pleasure, all the sunny swimming pools of the world would be impossibly overcrowded, while the comfortable chairs in air conditioned rooms would all be empty.
Copyright: David Bouchier
