Different strokes for different folks but not the butterfly, thanks - Susan Morrison
Not even my late grandfather, a life-long enthusiastic swimmer, was impressed by this new-fangled stroke. He told my mum he’d had a go, but he wouldn’t bother again. He was 89 at the time.
Someone made that silly stroke up, I’m telling you. You can see the origin of the classic swimming styles. The breast stroke was obviously designed for women to simultaneously swim and blether. There is a sporty version, but who needs that when soap operas and family dramas need to be discussed?
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Hide AdThe crawl clearly developed because it's actually a natural way to churn through the water, and it looks pretty impressive, especially in films. You can’t imagine Bond doing the breast stroke, can you? No. I rest my case.
When I was about 12, my granddad took me swimming at our local pool. When his back was turned, Andrew Millar dared me to jump from the highest diving dale. No idea how high it was, but I remember hitting water with the force of an Apollo capsule landing in the Pacific, bahookie first, a technique known as ‘bombing’.
This was actually in flagrant contravention of the swimming pool rules, but the life guards didn’t stop us because the prevailing view in those days was that the dales were open, you took your chances.
Untrained kids hurling themselves off the high diving board barely qualified as a breach of the regulations. Far more egregious were the sins of heavy petting or, worse, smoking.
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Hide AdThere were posters with all the rules up, which means that somewhere, at sometime, water-borne smokers must have been a general and widespread pest. How did they get their matches lit? And where did they keep their Woodbines?
Bet someone swimming past doing the butterfly soaked their fags.
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