I have a tune in my head: ‘Bobbing along, bobbing along on the bottom of the beautiful briny sea’…. I have been singing it to myself for the past few days in an attempt to cool down. Mallorca seems to have skipped July and gone straight for the crazy heat of August. Que calor!
The best place to cool down is the local pool, and we’re blessed to have the municipal one just down the road from us. It’s a bargain too, for the whole year, for a family to use the indoor and outdoor pools in the borough of Andratx it costs an incredible 100€. La Gidg likes the responsibility of looking after her own membership card, and we like the fact that it costs less than 30c a day to go swimming.
This does throw up the issue of what to wear. La Gidg has got 6 different sets of costumes and kiddie bikinis, Ollie has two pairs of shorts (neither of them the hilarious budgie smuggler speedos that you see on some more of the optimistic male swimmers), and I have an elderly swimming costume which I guess I should replace. But what with? Looking in women’s magazines you can choose from many different cossies which apparently will ‘flatter your shape’. But they all come down to the same thing: 2 millimetres of lycra and a smile. It’s a fallacy surely, how can anything like that actually work? If you haul it in in one area, it has to poke out somewhere else. What I find works for me is shouting and pointing at something imaginary in the far distance and whilst everyone is distracted doing a runner to the pool. I have also become one of those women who doesn’t like to get her hair wet, so I don’t leap into the pool, but hurriedly scuttle down the steps tout suite.
But then, heaven. Like a herd of hippos having a mud bath, we stay submerged until everything goes wrinkly. Thankfully there is a bar which sells a mean G & T, and ice cream. If we would move in if we could.
That is not a possibility though, and work will insist on raising its persistent head. Strategically booking appointments in air conditioned offices with water coolers is the only way forward when out and about. Failing that there is always the option of sitting directly in front of a fan, but that doesn’t work so well if you have to answer the phone, ‘Where are you? You sound like you’re in a wind tunnel’.
In the end it’s all about mind over matter, so why not join me in a rousing chorus, ‘Bobbing along, bobbing along….’