Swim Auld

The senses are vital to life. They are life. We all know how important sight, sound, touch, and scent are, yet for 99% of our daily life we glide around in auto pilot until something clicks in the brain and for a fleeting instant you find yourself hurtling through time to a place in the past, a stage set we departed long ago. In that instant you see faces, hear voices, sounds and “feel” part of the past. It sends shivers down the spine, all the more so as we age and our memory becomes more sieve like.

When you have spent as much time as we all have in swimming pools, from our earliest years, to the time of role reversal where we are the chauffer and sons and daughters plough up and down like human metronomes, it’s hardly surprising what some of these mental time travel triggers are and where they take you to.

Walk into an aging Victorian swimming pool, smell the chlorine. It’s Calder Street, Glasgow championships and the bustle of swimmers and coaches huddled round the tiny pool, screaming and urging their charges along. Or is it the “bucket” sinking down into the deep end of Maryhill and the resulting stinging fumes as close to Dulce et Decorum est you want to go! Maybe it’s the fight for your turn in the hot tub after leaving the frozen water, or the pool attendant nonchalantly flipping a cockroach onto its’ back with scoop of water. Is it the long cycle home along a dark and scary canal path. More likely it’s Auld hollering, nay, imploring you to go faster, “just one more time”, veins bulging in his neck, threatening and then suddenly the big smile as he shouts “Hogg!!!”

Perhaps the strongest trigger is a song. Bohemian Rhapsody blaring and I’m instantly in the changing room of Knightswood, younger than my son is now, with old school friends shouting and screaming, not far from the beginning of the journey. Mrs Lockheart is warning us that soon she will release us into the clutches of Jim Auld. “Then you’ll be in trouble”.

It was the best trouble I’ve ever found myself in.

David Hogg