Swimming pools: what’s the point of them? I don’t mean big public pools, the benefits of which are clear. I mean the small private ones in gardens, which you see in particular abundance as you descend over various home counties coming in to land at Gatwick, or at hotels, or some rental properties. Particularly cooed over are the ones known as infinity pools, where one side isn’t a proper side, so to speak. No, thrillingly, the water flows right over the edge. So what? I mean, really, so what?
If you do an internet search for the number of houses with pools in the UK, the first number that comes up is a staggering 210,000. The best part of a quarter of a million? Surely not.
Further investigation suggests the average size of a domestic pool is roughly 9 metres by 4.5 metres. Plunging deeper into these shallow waters, I learn that a pool of this size tends to contains about 50,000 litres of water. This, multiplied by 210,000, gives a total number of litres that’s too big for my calculator, which reads 1.05e10. No, me neither. I find a bigger calculator, which expresses that as 10,500,000,000. That’s 10.5bn litres of water in pools that have one thing in common: they are decidedly unsuitable for swimming in.
If you are any kind of swimmer, a 9-metre length might take you all of three strokes. With meaningful swimming impossible, what are you left with? I simply don’t know what to do in these oversize bathtubs. Unlike in our baths at home, you can’t lie there and read.
I got in a hotel pool in Croatia last week, then stood there wondering how to busy myself. I dunked my head in and it felt quite nice, I suppose. I floated on my back a while and then wallowed for a minute or two. Hmm, what now? I swam three pointless strokes to the other end and then ran out of ideas. As this was – be still, my beating heart – an infinity pool, I went over to the “infinity” side and tried in vain to understand what so many people find beguiling about them. Then I got out and got on with trying to address my grumpiness.
Is it my age? Is it like snowfall, delight at which is inversely proportional to your years? As a kid, we had family friends who had a pool. The excitement I felt before visiting them was beyond compare. I suspect that was because we went only once or twice a year; if I had had a pool in my back garden, I would have been bored within days.
I can think of only one person I’ve met who owned a domestic pool and couldn’t do without it. She had what’s known as an endless pool – similar in name to the wretchedly pointless infinity pool, but very different. In endless pools, you swim against a current, so proper swimming is possible. Her name is Julie Bradshaw. She holds the record for swimming the Channel butterfly and was the first person to swim butterfly around Manhattan Island. When I interviewed her, nearly 20 years ago, she was a part-time PE teacher at Leicester prison. She would rise at 4am every morning, get in the tiny pool out the back of her modest house in Loughborough and swim butterfly for four hours. Then she would go to work. Respect.
I called her yesterday and was delighted to find that she is now an MBE, for her services to swimming and charity. She is working as a psychotherapist and life and mindset coach – and still swimming ferociously. Her endless pool is on the blink, but no matter: she has a swimming tether, with which she attaches herself to a handrail, using that to swim on the spot. Who knew? I, for one, will never again go on holiday without one.
• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
