Splish Splash

Splish splash. Splish splash. It's pretty difficult to learn to swim when you have little water confidence. As a child, it would have been easier, but that ship sailed long ago after a not very nice incident with a pool-based bully. As a result, after starting very late, six or seven years of practice has resulted in a slightly shoddy front crawl that lacks the confidence to go into the very deep diving end of the pool and spells of terror when contemplating back stroke. It would probably be okay, especially after all the practice in not sinking like a stone, but you never know. One day, there will a whole linear length. Maybe it will be tomorrow, or in three weeks time, or sometime in the 2030s, but it will certainly happen.

Water confidence is difficult. You almost need to stop trying to swim and just melt into the ambience, move along to whatever hopefully compatible music might be playing on the leisure centre system, and centre in on yourself just like in meditation. Be part of the world in which you live, and so on, new age people. Then you stop thinking about the water, slowly lose your nerves, and gain confidence in the calmness. This all goes to nothing if you are surrounding by thrashing other swimmers in a too-busy pool packed with chaos, but it happens sometimes. Sometimes, if you're lucky, and the world is not too mean.

Building up many types of confidence can be similar in procedure: You just need to immerse yourself in the activity in question in favourable circumstances. However, all this from someone who paddles up to the halfway line and peeks into the diving end may be a little too much to take! Some people can be pushed in to the water and pop up paddling quite happily, but others can be pushed in and take trauma for ages to come. It's a bit like tutoring in many respects. With some students you can just jump in and feel happy that it won't leave any scars if it goes wrong, and with others you have to invoke the baby steps principle. Slowly, slowly, slowly.

Yes, some people like to splish splash instead of stroke stroke, and there's nothing wrong with that. To the pool!

O.