My grandson’s getting into the rugby: ‘Which one’s West Ham?’

My grandson and I had a lovely hour-long swim at the leisure centre. We had the learner pool to ourselves for the first half an hour, during which we threw and dived for our little weighted plastic sharks. Then a stocky man, tattooed like a Maori, and his little boy entered the pool. The little boy, Conrad, was in the same primary-school class as Oscar, so they teamed up and went away with the fairies together. They played a game in which they took turns to stand rigidly to attention at the pool’s edge, then topple forward, still rigid, face-down into the water. Result: eye-watering belly flops that weren’t as painful as they looked, they said. Their belly-flop game released Conrad’s father and me from our duties as entertainment managers. I grasped the opportunity to swim front-crawl widths of the 24-inch-deep pool. Each width was two arm strokes maximum. Conrad’s father sat in the water up to his neck and appeared to go in his mind to a very faraway and peaceful place, so that the wet, bearded head, tilted upwards with unseeing eyes, wore a beatific look.