January
- Multi-person swimming lane etiquette is all entirely workable if you assume it solely involves people with average-size bodies who've been taught to swim properly, but that's not quite addressing reality in its varied face. As a swimmer who frequents busy public pools during the winter months I am not unaccustomed to being inadvertently touched and stroked by strangers while I try my best to keep to my own bubble of movement. Often the collision is nobody's fault except life's. A classic example was the old man sharing my lane last Monday at my local public pool: a conventional enough swimmer, but whose limbs were so unusually gangly, they made it impossible for him to pass me in the opposite direction without at least running a couple of long bony fingers sensuously across my ribs. I felt the best course of action was to avoid eye contact and uphold the lie that zero intimacy was taking place between us. But men of such space-consuming lankiness around the age of 80 - a time of life when even extremely tall people have usually calmed down and settled for being merely medium-long - are rare and, even as I averted my gaze from the man and his wandering limbs, I was aware of a certain one-off magnetism about him. Therefore when I finally did take a moment to look him over and realised he was Abraham Lincoln, it made total sense. Looking back, the stovepipe hat probably should have given it away immediately, since it is not often in modern day Exeter that you see a person doing backstroke in one of those. I also suppose the moment when he whacked me gently in the ear with his flailing arm and mumbled "Beg your pardon, ma'am" in my direction also might have been viewed as a clue by people more perceptive than me. And now, sadly, as I felt the urge to capitalise on the physical closeness the 16th President Of The United States Of America and I had already established and ask him some of the questions I'd always wanted to, such as whether, despite his reputation as The Great Emancipator, it was true that he actually opposed social equality, and what he thought of the hullabaloo and showmanship of modern day WWE wrestling, I realised it was too late: like so many politicians before and after him, he had changed lanes.
