TAKE THE PLUNGE

AND MAKE A SPLASH AT YOUR MUNICIPAL LIDO, DECREES STEPHEN SMITH

In John Cheever’s short story The

Swimmer, a man leaves his friend’s house and breaststrokes home through the pools of his neighbours, squelching from one backyard to the next. The film Death

in Venice finds Dirk Bogarde’s declining aesthete on the Venetian lido, weeping over an exquisite, unobtainable youth. What of our own bathing fleshpot, the British lido, a monument to Thirties modernism and outdoor recreation?

It’s redolent of breezy changing huts and bobbing corn plasters. But our rivieras of reinforced concrete are as beguiling as anything the continent has to offer. Like an orchid that blooms for only minutes a year, the lido’s allure lies in the golden moment when the rare prerequisites for a good time are all in alignment: sunshine, a day on the lam, and a slather of petroleum jelly and lanolin.

After years of decline, the lido is being clasped to our goosepimply breast. Students of architecture admire its graceful lines, which echo the art deco design of great liners and hotels. And its spartan enchantments have been embraced by writers including Roger Deakin and Kate Rew. Not only that but the lido, even more than the gym or bootcamp, is the playground of the alpha male. I once essayed a length or two of Parliament Hill Lido alongside Alastair Campbell. I wasn’t alongside him for long: he took an indecent pleasure in caning me. But whisper it: the hard men of the baths, the triathletes and Channel swimmers, thrash up and down the lanes in cosseting wetsuits. If you’d like to get one over on them, simply show up in your briefest budgie smugglers.