So today I had my inaugural lunchtime swim, and I am pleased to report that while the open-air pool in Covent Garden doesn’t quite live up to Lake Huron, it’s a lot nicer than Brockwell Lido. Architecturally it’s pretty horrible, unlike the Lido, which is gorgeous, but the warm water changes everything and transforms it from a hostile environment into a welcoming one. I only managed four lengths – and, well, I had to have a rest in the middle – but it didn’t leave me cold and miserable like my Lido swim did, but rather happily invigorated, albeit with trembly knees that may not be working at all by the morning. There’s something about swimming in warm water on a cold day that is just perfect and not like anything else. I will be back.
Category Archives: London
Swimming
In an attempt to honour the third of my new year’s resolutions, which was to find a better form of exercise than Pilates, I have been thinking about going swimming. The last time I went swimming in this country was at Brockwell Lido this summer. The water was deep and icy-cold and I lasted less than a length before it started to feel like a struggle. I think I managed a total of three lengths in about twenty minutes, all the while panicking that I’d give up and drown in the deep end, even though I was never more than a few yards away from a lifeguard, and I was one of only three or four people at the pool.
But water does funny things to me. I can’t watch movie scenes filmed underwater without starting to feel nervous, and the anxiety I start to feel whenever I’m out of my depth is not nearly proportionate to the actual risk, although that must be a commoner reaction than I thought, or we wouldn’t use the term “out of one’s depth” to mean “in trouble”. I’m not a very strong swimmer, but I can float and bob around quite happily for forty-five minutes or so without needing to touch the ground, so it’s a psychological problem rather than a physiological one.
The problem is, most pools – especially serious, unheated outdoor pools like the Brockwell Lido – aren’t really designed to be bobbed and floated in. They’re designed for people who want to swim lengths. Frankly, I never want to swim lengths. I want to do star jumps and dolphin leaps and handstands. But if it’s a choice between swimming lengths and any other form of aerobic exercise, I will happily go for the lengths. I have no desire to lose weight (I feel compelled to say this in the light of my second New Year’s resolution, which was not to be bridezilla: I feel quite strongly that I don’t want to be one of those women who suddenly shoot down to a size eight in the weeks before their weddings, and as it happens this sits very happily with the fact that I have no plans to stop eating and drinking exactly what I want, whenever I want it), but I would like to be fitter and I would like to sleep better, and Pilates only offers small consolation in these departments. I need to do something that makes me tired.
So I think I’m going to sign up for a Swim London pass, which is cheaper than gym membership and covers forty pools across London. It doesn’t include the Lido, which is a shame since Brockwell Park is less than thirty seconds’ walk from home, but it does include Brixton and Crystal Palace, both a brisk walk or bus ride away, as well as the Oasis centre in Covent Garden which is two minutes from my office AND has a heated rooftop pool. I may not be able to bob and float there, but at least I’ll be able to swim a length without my lungs closing up in protest at the cold.
Because the thing is that as well as being afraid of the water, I love it. My two most vivid memories of pure physical pleasure in the last year are of swimming, once here:
And once here:
The first is a pool in Cyprus, the second Lake Huron. In Cyprus I swam twice a day, in a pool that was never deeper than I am tall. In Lake Huron I went out of my depth because the water was warm and soft and tasted of minerals and it wasn’t frightening. Actually there is an undertow in the lake, even though there are no tides, and the bottom has sharp rocks along it – a fact that scars on my right hand and knee will attest to. But you see, I wasn’t scared of injuring myself when I injured myself, so I didn’t mind. And when you’re out there bobbing and floating and spinning, with nobody to watch you except a few water birds and the occasional butterfly, there’s nothing in the world like it.
What do you suppose are the chances that swimming at the Oasis sports centre in Covent Garden will be more like Lake Huron and less like Brockwell Lido? Yeah, me too. But I’ll give it a go.
Upselling
Here is a fuzzy view looking east from the top of the Gherkin:
You will start to appreciate the lengths I go to in order to keep you entertained when I tell you that in order to obtain this photo, I had to sit through a half-hour presentation on the benefits of buying land in Brazil.
The beloved, you see, had been offered a glass of champagne at the top of the Gherkin on condition that he undertake a mysterious assignment, the details of which would be revealed on the day. He was allowed to bring a friend, so on Friday evening we duly turned up at 30 St Mary Axe, instantly distinguishable from the floods of people who work there by our absent suits and ties, and awaited further instructions.
After a few minutes, we were guided through an airport security gate and through to the lifts, where we were sternly told not to take any photos. Then up to the twenty-somethingth floor, where we were offered tea or coffee and placed in a sanitary-looking waiting room with some other victims. “Do you know what we’re here for?”, they asked us, anxiously. “No”, we admitted, “but we think it’s safe.”
Eventually we were escorted next door to a room dotted with round tables, at each of which sat a lonely-looking salesperson. We were pointed towards Danny*, whose shiny suit almost disguised the fact that he was barely out of his teens. Danny told us that we’d be watching a short presentation about buying property in Brazil. We asked Danny some questions. Danny didn’t know the answers, but what he didn’t know he made up for by repeating sections from his practised sales spiel.
Then we watched a video, in which an American woman berated us for foolishly keeping all money in the bank (she clearly hadn’t seen our statements) and suggested that the only sensible option was to invest in property. She then explained that it was best to do this in “developing” countries, where land was cheaper and ripe for development.
They stopped the video and asked for questions. The beloved tried to ask about sustainable development and artificial inflation of land prices. I tried to ask about the protection of wildlife. Danny still didn’t know the answers, but gamely filled in the space with more rehearsed lines. He put me in mind of an estate agent, which I suppose is what he was. We watched some more of the video. We decided not to ask any more questions.
If Danny’s sales method was uncompromising, it was as nothing compared to the full-force blast of hot air we got from his boss, who looked like a genuine 1980s car salesman with a checked suit and dyed blond hair and treated us to a full minute of his undivided attention. Any more and we’d probably have given in and remortgaged the egg to buy the land, but fortunately he somehow divined our lack of engagement with the process and left us alone with Danny, who, sensing that his chance had gone, suggested we retire upstairs for the glass of champagne.
Several complicated lift journeys later, we reached the 38th floor, on which lurks a private members’ bar, where we sat and admired the view while Danny ordered the champagne. And suddenly, as we sat and chatted, a small miracle started to happen. It began with a conversation about where we lived, which gradually expanded to cover Danny’s friend’s band, his thoughts on the beloved’s jacket and, eventually, his preference for films about revolutionaries (“I’m not really bothered about the politics, I just really love a rebel”). This corporate robot had quietly turned into a real person, who smiled for the first time as his infectious enthusiasm gradually brought a sparkle to the evening, as well as the wine.
We shan’t be buying any land in Brazil, but when I think about Friday night, I am most pleased not by the terrific view or the adequate champagne, but by the sight of someone slipping out of corporate mode and into human mode in front of my eyes. I imagine his company would sell more property if they allowed their employees to be humans the whole time, rather than only when they fail to make a sale. And just think what a nicer place the world would be if all companies adopted that strategy, rather than having their robots lie to us all the time. Ah well. It was nice to see it once.
*Names have been changed to protect the guilty
The park again
I took this picture in the south-west corner of Brockwell Park yesterday. I love the city views, but I really like this one too, because you can pretend you’re in the countryside:
Talking of nature, we spent a couple of hours last Sunday afternoon in the back garden of the Crown and Greyhound in Dulwich Village, where we were protected from a brief bout of rain by this monster, whose branches extend so far across the garden that nobody got wet at all:
I think it’s a horse chestnut, but I would be happy to be corrected.
Sunday lunch at the Rosendale: a warning from history
I don’t write about restaurants very often, because most of the places I go out to eat are perfectly nice without being amazing, and thus not really worth mentioning, since I am not a food blogger. But I am making an exception for The Rosendale, because if I can save one person from enduring a Sunday lunch like the one I had yesterday, it will have been worthwhile.
Years ago, The Rosendale was a pub which did pizza. Good pizza – the type you’d travel for, although I only lived around the corner then, so I didn’t have to. Then I moved away, and by the time I came back it was a gastropub and getting good reviews all over the place. So we ate there, once, and it was good. But somehow it took us two years to go back, even though it’s a fifteen-minute walk from home, and this time, it was bad.
The service, to be fair, was only mediocre. After a long period during which nobody came to take our order (even though there were only two or three other groups there), we were presented with a basket of stale bread. Well, maybe it wasn’t all stale, but the piece I got was definitely past its best. As I spread it with butter so soft and tasteless it might have been margarine, I thought “they wouldn’t serve stale bread; this must be the texture it’s supposed to have”. But then I ate it, and no, it was just stale.
Next came beef carpaccio sliced so thickly as to look more like a couple of steaks, and a gazpacho soup so tart it set my teeth on edge, and such a disconcerting shade of ketchup-red that I could only assume it had come out of a tin. It was accompanied by greasy garlic croutons, which, in a charming touch of consistency, were also stale. What it didn’t come with was a spoon: I had to grab a waitress and ask for one.
The beloved’s main course of rabbit was, to give it its due, very good. My roast beef with all the trimmings, in contrast, was possibly the most inedible plate of food I have ever been presented with, not including the time a Spanish woman cooked me a pig’s trotter to welcome me to her home. The beef was tough and tasteless, the roast potatoes (which were the reason I’d ordered it) were dry and almost certainly reheated (or if not, then just very badly cooked) and, inexplicably, the Yorkshire pudding had the actual consistency of a mushroom. I’d noticed a plate going back into the kitchen with a barely-touched Yorkshire pud languishing on it, and at the time I’d thought “what kind of a maniac would leave a Yorkshire pudding uneaten?”, but in the end I had to do the same. The mixed veg had all been steamed together, which meant that the carrots were underdone but the broccoli and beans were fine, which was fortunate because they were the only part of it I enjoyed.
The puddings looked good, but we were too disspirited by the whole experience to stay and find out. At £40 a head for two courses with wine, they need to get better at cooking quite quickly. As for our Sunday lunch, the next time I want to leave the washing up to someone else I think I’ll head into Herne Hill for a perfectly adequate roast for half the price at The Commercial, or even a proper old-fashioned pub pizza at The Half Moon.
Lambeth Country Show 2010
I usually wring every last available drop of fun out of the Country Show, but this year, for a variety of reasons, I only spent a couple of hours there each day and as a result I felt I missed quite a lot of it. I went to bed last night feeling faintly sad and anxious at not having spent more time there, like a child who suddenly realises that when she wakes up it won’t be Christmas any more.
But when I awoke this morning I remembered that it’s quality, not quantity, that counts; and this year’s show was one of the best I can remember. The weather was perfect – sunny and warm but not hot – and the music was super (Alabama 3 in particular were brilliant, as they always are); the atmosphere was better than ever and despite record attendance it felt completely relaxed and friendly everywhere I went. It was nothing at all like that year that we had to dive out of the way of a bunch of teenagers trying to stab another bunch of teenagers. (But then, I was child-free this year, so I didn’t have to go to the funfair.)
Here’s a girl dancing in front of a parade that popped up out of nowhere while we were buying books for 20p each from the library van:
And here’s another shot of the same parade:
According to the South London Press, 180,000 people attended the show over the two days. So it was doubly odd to find myself back there this morning, one of perhaps half a dozen people whose daily business takes them into Brockwell Park at 7am. It looked empty and silent, but also kind of beautiful:
Forget Cyprus, I never want to live away from here.
Onward and upward
Dang. I was so close to being right about Holland winning the World Cup! But I’m glad Spain won it, because they deserved to, and because I have more Spanish than Dutch friends. Although I have just inspected my bank balance and it turns out the cash I would have won had Holland beaten Spain would have been very useful (payday is Thursday). Oh well.
Anyway, I’m going to move on and pretend none of it ever happened, and I’m going to start looking forward to the event of the year, the Lambeth Country Show at Brockwell Park this weekend. The Lambeth Country Show is worth our council tax on its own. There’s live music, actual animals, jousting, fruit and vegetable shows, craft stalls, cake, cider, a funfair and sheep-shearing demonstrations. It is the most fun in the world, and it’s all free and on my doorstep. Who needs holidays?
Lost in translation
The beloved and I took a speedboat ride up the Thames yesterday evening. I would heartily recommend it – it’s very exciting – but it does do interesting things to your hair. There were only six of us on the boat, plus a captain and a guide, and once we got past Tower Bridge we went super-fast, accompanied by the theme tunes from Baywatch and then James Bond. It was brilliant, and I was only a tiny bit scared.
Then we ate at Caffe’ Vergnano on the South Bank. I really like it there, but it’s somewhere I have usually gone before a film or a show, so I tend to go early and it’s always fairly empty. Last night we were there later on, and it was very busy. Halfway through our meal they seated a couple so close to us that it was nearly impossible for me to leave my seat without crashing into their table. It added an element of challenge to the evening, but it also gave us the chance to listen in to their conversation. Actually we had no choice: she was more or less completely silent, but he had a great booming voice that drowned out the sound of the trains just feet above our heads. Sadly they were speaking a language I didn’t recognise – I don’t speak many languages, but I can recognise the sound of a lot of them, and this wasn’t one I knew. It might have been Portuguese, or one of the eastern European languages that has nothing to do with Russian.
Anyway, I don’t know how much I would have enjoyed listening to him had I known what he was saying, but listening with no idea what he was talking about was great fun. He had a peculiarly mirthless laugh with which he punctuated every sentence. Because I didn’t recognise the words he was using, I have attempted to reproduce them phonetically, to give you an idea:
Amazon turquoise Lithuanian bathtub. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Malevolent projector foolproof simian pilot. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Christmas fettucine bones, bananas and bra. Ha. Ha. Ha.
It was disconcerting, but also kind of fascinating, and loud enough that it was easier for us to listen to him than attempt a conversation of our own. She sat in silence opposite him, occasionally joining in with the solemn laughter. I tried to imagine what he might be saying. The tone implied that it was probably something like
We have trapped your father in a dungeon. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. If you do not tell us where the jewels are he will die. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. We will show him no mercy. Ha. Ha. Ha.
But I think that was just the way he spoke. He was probably saying
Look at these jokers next to us. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. They are listening to me instead of having a conversation of their own. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha. And they both have hair that points vertically upwards. Ha. Ha. Ha.
Sunshine in Bermondsey
It was both discourteous and misguided of me, I now realise, to assume that it’s always raining in Bermondsey. Yesterday was our final rehearsal for the wedding that we’re playing music at this weekend, so back we all trooped to the Bermondsey Trading Estate, which this time around was bathed in bright sunlight:
The equipment stood there for about five minutes, while we waited for a cab. When we picked up the keyboard, it was almost too hot to hold. It’s good to have new experiences from time to time.
Bookshop dilemma
A new bookshop has recently opened in Herne Hill, which has for the first time caused me to question my highly successful “no new books” policy. We already have an Oxfam shop with a good selection of books, and I am a library member and anyway have a pile of about thirty unread books sitting in the flat, all of which are good reasons for not buying any new books at all, let alone new books at full price, which in Herne Hill Books they mostly are.
And yet. I’d like them to do well, and not have to close down in six months’ time because everybody thinks the same way as me. Apart from anything else, you can’t give library books or Oxfam books as presents, so it’s useful to have somewhere nearby available for emergency birthday purchases when I’ve left it too late to go anywhere else.
I solved this dilemma temporarily today by buying a copy of East of Acre Lane, which since it’s set locally seemed an appropriate purchase, even though it broke the rule. And I think I have a good ongoing solution too, which is to order my book club books from there, since they are exempt from the rule, being too hard to find by other means. I just have to remember not to accidentally buy a pile of four extra books each time I go in to place an order. I will let you know how I get along.
But right now, I have to go: it’s Ronnie O’Sullivan v Mark Williams in the snooker semi-final. Shh.
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