Whacked

I got whacked in the head in the swimming pool today by one of those elderly men who plough up and down like hairy torpedoes, wearing Speedos, caps and goggles and doing something complicated like butterfly stroke. Normally I just get blown off course, spluttering furiously in the swell of their wake, but this one clonked me really hard and for a moment I went right under and felt properly dizzy before pulling myself together and deciding against drowning.

He didn’t even notice.

I got out with trembling legs and decided to cheer myself up with a hot chocolate but I found myself sitting in the café with my hair dripping chlorine-laden water into my drink while I had a sniveling cry, wiping my nose on my sleeve.

Tomorrow’s my allergy test and I’m feeling quite tense about it. I’d pushed it out of my mind until Saturday but once I started thinking about it, the idea kept bobbing back to the surface. I’ve only just thought of this but my swimming mishap is a good metaphor for how I feel. I’m paddling along doing my best but at any moment something’s going to come crashing into me and knock me under.

I’m ashamed of myself for being so self-pitying but I also think sometimes I go too far the other way and ignore things I should be paying attention to. The allergy test itself is nothing to be worried about but it is the beginning of the build-up to having a second go at the operation, and the thought of this makes me feel very tired and anxious.

I had a weird moment on the way home. Because the clocks have changed and the evenings are lighter, I walked through Corams Fields but, in my distraction, came out an unfamiliar way into a street I didn’t recognise. Just for a moment I was seized with the idea of keeping walking, always turning into an unfamiliar street; a heroic walk like the walks in Dickens novels, from Whitechapel to Rochester.

It was, I suppose, one of those ‘self’ moments, where you seem to stand outside yourself and see how small you look. And a man in a white van, who leaned out of the window, banging on the door and yelling “Phwoar! Knockers!” broke the spell.