Only humiliation will stop the pool leakers
Long ago, when David Walliams’s high campery was still funny and not a 10pm national embarrassment, he and Matt Lucas did a hilarious Little Britain sketch set in a swimming pool.
Walliams plays the attendant who calls over Lucas’s character Vicky Pollard and orders her to leave the water for pushing a little girl.
“Get out and go and get changed,” he instructs, after her lengthy prevarication.
“I’m just going to have a wee first and then I’ll get changed,” she responds, before pausing, still in the water, her face fixed with concentration as she empties her bladder below the surface. “Right, I’ll go and get changed now,” she says, and effortfully wades off.
It had just enough truth to be hilarious. But the joke’s on us now.
New research has revealed that our swimming pools are awash with urine; an Olympic sized-pool may contain up to 50 gallons of it.
It’s a revolting thought, all the more so because there’s nothing that can be done about it – not even chlorine, which doesn’t deactivate it nearly as efficiently as had been thought. And, worse still, there’s no alternative, given the temperature of our seas at this time (arguably any time) of year.
My eight-year-old adores the “water”, unfortunately. As I feel it’s my duty to teach her to swim, I have no choice but to take her to our local pool. Ought we to go private? Despite the extra expense, I’m not sure crawling through health-club wee is any less stomachchurning than the municipal stuff.
I’d read in the past that our eyes sting while swimming not due to the chlorine but because of the you-know-what. I’d chosen to ignore that snippet. After all, the occasional floating baby is bound to leak. But it would appear that everyone’s at it (except me, obviously, pinkie promise). So I can’t help but feel aggrieved at all those show-off swimmers doing lengths for hours at a time without so much as a loo break.
If only those urban myths about pee turning the water bright blue could be revived – or turned into reality. Seriously, public humiliation is the only way we can possibly turn back this rising yellow tide in our pools.