A stroke of bad fortune

After many years of wondering, I’ve finally realised why it is that people who are carrying something longer than their car on the roof-rack of their car insist on tying a garish rag to the end of their planks of timber, scaffolding and/or dead giraffes. It’s so that you’ll have something with which to wipe the blood from your face when you bang your fucking head off it.

I learnt this to my cost on a recent expedition to my local swimming pool, an amenity I had steadfastly ignored for three years (without sustaining head injuries of any kind), despite the fact that it’s less than 10 minutes’ walk from my house. I was attempting to cross the street when I took a step and… wallop! I walked head first into the business end of a thick bundle of planks.

I reacted in no way differently to anyone else who suffers an embarrassing injury when out alone. I yelped with pain and swore aloud. I pressed both hands to my forehead to staunch the trickle of blood that wasn’t there. I checked to see if anyone had noticed what had happened.

Of course they had – two old ladies stood nearby, staring at me dispassionately. I removed my hands from my head, placed them on my hips and looked back in a manner I that I hoped conveyed the following message: “I know you two old birds think I’m a big gobshite for walking into these planks, but what you don’t know is that I actually did it on purpose. I’d love to tell you why, but if I did, I’d have to kill you. Now piss off you old bats.”

Next thing you know, the bloke whose planks I’d just head butted emerged from an adjacent shop. Noticing me gingerly rub my head while standing in close proximity to his planks, he enquired if I’d just banged my head off his planks.

“Yeah, but I’m alright,” I replied.

“Why d’ya think I tied that big red rag to the end of ‘em?” he enquired, laughing.

“So I’d have something to wipe the blood off my head,” I growled sarcastically, failing to see the funny side of the situation, because there wasn’t one.

With both my ego and my head dented, I soldiered on to the swimming pool with grim determination. I was determined to start taking exercise as, a few days previously, a woman who’d gone to bed with me had gazed upon me with what can be best described as thinly veiled disappointment, and advised me to start taking some exercise.

Slumped across the pillows as I was at the time, sweating, wheezing, and gasping for breath, I couldn’t possibly argue, although if the power of speech hadn’t left me, I’d probably have pleaded: “Don’t go! I’m not usually like this until after the sex.”

Once in the swimming pool changing rooms, I attempted to familiarise myself with the rules and regulations. If there’s one thing in life more embarrassing than walking headfirst into a bundle of planks, it’s being publicly admonished by a spotty, whistle-happy teenage lifeguard at a swimming pool.

It was routine paddling prohibition: no running, no diving, no bombing, no petting (heavy or otherwise), no ducking, no ball games, no fishing, no smoking, no gurus, no teachers, no food, no drink, no this, no that, no the other. Everything, it seemed, was forbidden.

Once in the pool, I set out on my inaugural length. A graceful breast stroke seemed to be what was required early doors, so I pootled along at a leisurely pace, bobbing my head in and out of the water, mouth agape, as I sluiced through it like the Piscean I am.

About two-thirds of the way down the pool, it became disturbingly apparent that the lifeguard was giving me the skank eye from his lofty perch on the high chair. The bastard had spotted something. I gazed around. Nobody nearby. He was definitely looking at me. Not only that, now he was out of the chair, standing where I was going to end up in about 15 seconds. Nobody else was wearing a swimming cap, so it wasn’t that. Nobody else was wearing white plastic veruca shoes. What the hell was I doing wrong?

“Are you chewing!?!” roared Clapham’s answer to Mitch Buchanan.

“Em, yes,” I confessed meekly, caressing the offending ball of gum with the tip of my tongue.

“There’s no chewing in the pool. Put it in there,” he harrumphed, before producing a wastepaper basket from under his chair, hunkering down at the edge of the pool and holding it several inches above my nose. Rather than remove the gum from my mouth with my hand and place it in the waiting receptacle, I decided to show off by spitting it directly into the bin. Schoolboy error. It fell out of my mouth, landed in the pool and bobbed up and down in front of me.

“Just put the fucking gum in the bin, I’m sick of having to clean it out of the pool every day,” sighed Mitch, his enthusiasm for the job and life in general suddenly absent. And as those words left his lips it occurred to me that I hadn’t actually been chewing gum before getting in.

Eating a complete stranger’s chewing gum? I couldn’t have got out of that pool any faster if Jaws himself had been snapping at my toes.