Semi-centenarian

It was a milestone event. Though when I saw the queue I nearly turned around and ran.
Having passed through the portals of being fifty years of age I was now at last eligible for one of the perks such semi-centenarians can enjoy, namely reduced prices in the swimming baths!


I joined the slow moving queue that just shuffled along to the desk. Those ahead of me were fumbling in their pockets for the right change or were asking the patient woman at the desk to repeat her words.


When it was finally my turn I waited for the woman at the desk to peer at me closely. ‘You’re not old enough for the over 50’s swim,’ I wanted to hear her say. ‘You’re far too young.’

And I would have basked in the affirmative murmurs of those whose audio devices had been turned on and tuned in.

But she didn’t. She took my money without any question, and handed me my green wrist band without a word. Disappointed not to be challenged, I went to get changed.

There was a friendly babble of conversation in the pool. It seems most swimmers had brought their buddies along. The life-guards had not divided the pool into lanes so the whole expanse was open and inviting.

I was determined not to swim lengths and to break the mould expected of a semi-centenarian, so I swam all around the edge of the pool several times, and then struck out at the diagonals.

I was surrounded by confident stately swimmers, swimming lengths, often swimming in pairs who carried on a relaxed conversation as if they were chatting over a coffee.

The few snatches of conversation I overheard were earnest and serious. Pension plans were being discussed in all four corners of the pool. Hospital appointments were the topic of interest in the shallow end, and discussions as to where to store medicines absorbed the thoughts of those in the middle of the pool who teetered on the edge of the deep.

The mis-guided fantasy I’d had of a handsome millionaire with a burnished body surfacing next to me with smoldering eyes who would whisk me off to his castle in the country was splashed into droplets of chlorinated pain as a bald toothless man ran me down.

‘It’s a wonder they can swim and talk at the same time,’ he said in a disparaging tone about the two women in whose wake we now floundered.

I bit my lip, a nervous habit I still have and swam after them keen to put as much distance as I could between myself and Mr Cheerful.

At the midway point I paused and watched everyone go by. These are my peers. This is the club that I have inadvertently walked into. The two happily chatting women swam by me again. They had dyed permed blonde hair which even though they’d been swimming for nearly half an hour was still dry. Their powdery make-up was also unscathed. Thankfully myopia saved me from seeing anybody else as clearly. The pool had a Monet quality whose distant lily pads had a disconcerting way of revealing themselves to be toothless faces with tired expressions.

Then the true ordeal began. One by one as the hour reached its end, individuals would reach for the steps; and each time a worn body exhibited its battle scars: wounds from the surgeons’ knives; flubbering cellulite that puckered and wobbled as they falteringly reached for a towel; legs that were unsure of the line of the true horizon. Each body a terrible warning of what time has in store for a semi-centenarian such as me.

‘Don’t go again,’ a friend has warned.

But I know I will. These are now my peers. The ones that are brave enough to swim. The ones who are doing what they can to keep healthy and to defer the inevitable for yet another day. The ones who don’t care what others see because it isn’t important anymore.

And anyway, I haven’t quite joined them:I swam diagonals!