Swimming lessons are leaving out of my depth

It’s likely I don’t hate anything as much as my son hates swimming. Or rather, he hates “going swimming”, which is a concept discrete from swimming itself. Eighteen months into his aquatic education, he no longer skips to his lessons with a spring in his step; he wails and flails and gnashes his teeth, as if we’re bringing him to our local leisure centre to be eaten by centipedes. Worst of all, perhaps due to some type of self-protecting trauma response, he manages to forget, every single week, that these lessons exist, meaning that the second I pick him up early from after-school club each Monday, I get to witness it all over again: that light leaving his eyes; that look of utter desolation; the tang of betrayal, as he realises that his parents are evil, sadistic freaks who take pleasure only from his pain.

From there, the glowering begins, which evolves into wheedling on the short walk home. Like all seven-year-olds, he is a lawyer, and by the time we’ve entered our house to get his stuff, the negotiations will have started. He states first principles and offers bargains. He reminds us that he rarely forces us to go anywhere and says his time would be better spent in other ways. He promises to clean the living room (he won’t) or eat any vegetable I demand (limited to one unit). When my wife starts placing the togs, goggles and Crocs in our swim bag, he grabs it by the straps and tells her she doesn’t need to do this, like a love-rat husband in a divorce-themed melodrama pleading with his wife to put her suitcase away. Then comes a carousel of rebukes and denouncements, first uttered at our kitchen table, then while clambering into the car and continued from the back seat for the entirety of the journey swimward.

Curiously, once he’s in the pool he gets on with the actual swimming bit quite happily. I’ll freely admit I find this almost the most annoying part of our Monday-night trials, the fact he seems perfectly capable of enjoying the very thing he’s been so vexed about all this time. He makes little by way of progress in terms of actually improving his swimming and resolutely refuses to dunk his head fully underwater, but he smiles the entire time and it’s likely his instructors and classmates have never once intuited any dislike for the activity on his part whatsoever. My daughter, who swims in the smaller pool beside him with the littler kids, is happier still. She’s a natural born water-baby, never complains and spends the entire time splashing around with a mile-wide smile plastered on her tiny face.

There are further joys afterwards, of course, not least the part of swimming that makes things worth it for all of us – the thrilling chance to use those small drying machines that quickly wring water from your togs. I don’t know when these were invented, but I’ve only become aware of them in the last few years. Every time I use them, I marvel that so few things are as satisfying as watching torrents of water sluicing from a pipe in 10 short seconds, leaving soaked clothing not quite dry but not wet either. I don’t know why they thrill me so, but I honestly believe if I could contrive a career which consisted solely of using them all day, I’d have the greatest job satisfaction known to anyone.

Several Google searches have confirmed the exact make and model that our leisure centre uses, available for the low, low price of £2,334, many times more expensive than a tumble dryer, and less good at the one job both machines are for, but oh so thrillingly fast. By the time I find myself entertaining elaborate fantasies of spending a languorous winter’s day cross-legged on our kitchen floor, feeding an entire load of washing into one of those machines piece by piece, the kids are dried and dressed and we’re ready to depart for home.

Once back at the house, they’re starving and both are allowed their favourite dinner. For my son, cheesy pasta, for my daughter, pasta pesto. The mood, as with a group of people who’ve survived a landslide or an avalanche, is now warmly convivial. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” I ask my son. “No,” he says, jamming penne into his face. “I quite like going swimming, actually” he tells us. Cheerfully. Every single week.