Things we did on our holidays – pt 1

Roger Jr, Elvira and I went swimming in the Mediterranean Sea earlier last week – having survived our flight into terror, which in turn followed our airport wait into terror.

However Tancred refused to enter the water, which was perhaps unsurprising given the difficulties he has in remaining on his feet in the face of moderate air currents, let alone those offered up by the sea. He would be repeatedly led to the water's edge, apparently fascinated by the spectacle of the waves – only to turn away in horror as the creeping waters approached within six inches or so of his feet.

It was our last day in Plascassier, near Grasse, near Nice, in France. And it was a delightful end to a very pleasant week – marred only by:

1. Tancred spurting blood out of his eyebrow after falling face first (do one year olds fall any other way?) into the handle on a chest;
2. Roger Jr being staggeringly obnoxious around 90 per cent of the time that he was awake;
3. Receiving mosquito bites of such virulence that at one point I thought I had inadvertently broken my ankle.

I have for many years now been a little ambivalent about swimming. When I was a boy, I was really good at it. But much like the life cycle of the toad sees it go from fully aquatic tadpole to ungainly, crawling leathery blob, I too have become less of a swimmer and more of a puddle lurking fly gobbler as the years have passed. That's a METAPHOR, by the way.   

While Elvira swims effortlessly, I always seem to exert myself twice as much to cover half the distance. I put this down to being insufficiently buoyant, lacking a pair of front airbags (an excuse it is becoming ever harder to avail myself of).

Secondly, I am hopelessly susceptible to water-borne complaints of every kind. If my left ear lets in more water than it is exposed to in – say – a shower, I go deaf in it for as long as it takes for a foul-smelling lump of dark brown wax to work its way out. Just like in Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan.

As such, I only get my head under the water – and given my "eccentric centre of gravity", this is a necessity if I am not to be overtaken by people who are swimming for reasons of physical therapy – if I have ear plugs in.

Plus, I need goggles. Because when I went swimming at Centre Parcs in May, I got a sty on my eye which is still not properly healed.

Oh, and I got athletes foot from the floor at the gym a couple of years ago. Which is kind of related.

Basically, going into water exposes your delicate openings  to other people's filth. And so if a swimming pool full of chlorine dedicated to killing off that sort of shit is risky, going into a "natural" environment that lacks the benefits of disinfectants is positively a matter of taking one's life into one's own hands.  

It was thus with trepidation that I approached going into the Med.

Indeed, the last time I went full-bodily into the sea, I had fallen out of a canoe some six feet from the shore of Hayling Island, while Elvira and our canoeist friends conversed in a leisurely manner on the beach, oblivious of the fact that I had vanished in waters of some two feet of depth. Fortunately, my two star BCU training came back to me in an instant and I expertly disentangled myself from the stricken vessel and staggered gasping up the beach gabbling about how I had cheated certain death before anyone had even noticed I was gone.

Plus, swimming pools – for all their faults – rarely play host to fish. Be they living or be they dead, I have a lingering irrational fear of touching them. But of that more another time...suffice to say, when I put on Roger Jr's goggles, it turned out we were not alone down there.

I know what you're thinking: the sea at Cannes beach can hardly be considered a natural environment, consisting as much of yacht oil, Ambre Solaire and human urine as sea water.

And given the Mediterranean's well-deserved reputation for stinking of drain and being freezing cold (rarely mentioned, I find, in the Baedeker), it was pleasantly warm and odour-free.

Indeed and in conclusion, we had a lovely day out at the seaside – and I have yet to manifest any symptoms of my inevitable bout of amoebic dysentery.