I don’t remember my first swimming lesson, but it has attained legendary status in our family’s folklore. According to my parents, whilst the other three year-olds in my class got into the water with no fuss, I refused to put even so much as a toe in, and remained on the side of the learner pool, the picture of anguish and obstinacy in Pink Panther armbands. In the end, my mum was obliged to borrow a swimming costume from another mother and accompany me into the water for the rest of the lesson (sorry, Mum!) From this ignoble beginning however, I must have decided I quite liked swimming, because going to the pool became a twice-weekly fixture in my life for the next twenty years.

Now this pool, first opened in the 1970s, is closing. In fact, as I write, it has been closed for a week. The long pool hall on one side of the sports centre will be quiet, the water drained, the building awaiting whatever comes next, as the staff and customers move to a brand new facility right next door (which I am already inclined to dislike somehow - probably since it is not the pool I knew and loved). Over Christmas, when I was at home, I went swimming a few times, to say goodbye to this place where I spent such a large chunk of my early life. The pools at this centre weren’t anything fancy - there was a twenty-five metre, six-lane main pool, flanked by the learner pool at one end and a three metre-deep diving pool at the other. There was a singular crap slide, which would be turned on a few times a week and which was accessed by metal steps which banged hollowly under your feet as you raced up to join the line, excitedly waiting for your turn. All of the joins in the plastic chute used to bite into your bottom. It was basic, but it was familiar and homely.

As I swam here over Christmas, I tried to remember and give thanks for all of the experiences I’d had in that pool - learning to swim in the warm small pool, with its walrus-shaped sprinklers and hippo-shaped slides, and the terror I experienced the day I arrived to find that someone was painting a bucolic mural of swimming frogs on the back wall above the water (this was the late eighties, so of course, there was a mutant ninja turtle hidden amongst the lily pads). I remembered my earliest swimming teacher, an eccentric ex-navy officer who would bark encouragingly as he towed us, three small kids at a time, across the pool by the foam floats we clutched at arm’s length (all nibbled around the edge as standard). I remembered advancing from widths to lengths of the main pool, learning tumble turns and correct techniques, swimming sets and timing my rests. I learned lifesaving techniques, making makeshift floats from old pyjamas whilst treading water. I made friends here, met my first teenage boyfriend and had several panic attacks whilst swimming in galas (a talent for butterfly does not necessarily make you a natural competitive swimmer!) Later on, I got a part-time job as a lifeguard here and spent school and university holidays telling kids off for running, mopping changing rooms, flirting with other lifeguards, telling more kids off for running, cleaning up the odd bloody nose, checking the sauna for cases of fainting (no-one ever did, thankfully!) and watching the water endlessly, all whilst wearing yellow shorts. It was a perfect part-time job.

I swam at this pool through exams and breakups, university applications and arguments with friends and family, existential angst, despair and low self-esteem, and, much as I may have cried into my goggles, I always came out feeling better. When I left for university, I missed it. More than just healing and soothing though, swimming also helped me to discover a sort of power in myself - not only in finding my own physical strength, but also in realising my own self-worth. I’ve always felt much more comfortable in the water than on land - more powerful, more alive, more confident, beautiful, artistic and capable - this is where I am most myself. In the water, I can move with the grace, and ease I feel I lack on dry land, as if this is my real element, where I’m supposed to be. Whenever I’m feeling stressed, tangled, small or awkward in my everyday life, swimming resets me, making me feel expansive and joyful in a way I never do in the gym. I realised all of these things whilst swimming in this pool, which, even as a teenager made me feel grateful for and connected to this body of water. I still have dreams about these pools, even now.

When I climbed out of the water at the end of my last length in December, I took a long look around, trying to thank every part of the place for what it had done for me, trying to fix it all in my memory. When I go swimming at home next time, it’ll be in a new pool I’ll just be getting to know, to a new place which won’t figure so greatly in my life, for which I won’t feel the same affection. But there will be kids starting swimming lessons there this year, in that brand new pool, who will build a relationship with that place, for whom it will become a staple part of their life, and who will look back on that pool, in twenty- years time, with love, and that’s worth remembering. And if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to swim lengths and sad-happy cry into my goggles.