the echoes they surround....

Swimming is pretty tedious. The best thing that can be said for tonight's swim was that, by the time I got to the gym after leaving the office, I virtually had the pool to myself. In fact, about the only other people there were two girls having a good old natter as they swam up and down in the lane next to me.

The thirty of so minutes I spend at the pool, two or three times a week, is about the only time that I am alone with my thoughts and without any kind of external distractions. They play music around the pool, but as my ears spend almost the whole time below water, I don't hear a damn thing. I'd love to be able to say that I spent this time productively, and that as well as exercising my body, I get some quality thinking done. The sad truth, however, is that I either spend the whole time trying not to forget how many lengths I have done ("twenty-two, twenty-two, twenty-two, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six .... shit ....um .... twenty, twenty, twenty, etc.") or I find my brain gets stuck on a single thought that I just can't seem to shake off.

Today was little different, although at least I had a lane to myself for the duration and didn't need a battle of wills with anyone over their lack of end-of-lane courtesy.

As I surfaced at the end of my last length, I was just in time to catch a snippet of the two girls in the next door lane as they made their leisurely way back up the pool:

"Oh my God! Leanne had an orgy when she was 20!"
"No!"
"Yeah. She told me herself!"
"Really? Oh my God!"

Diverting though Leanne's dalliance with "Jonathan, Jonathan's dad and Lee" sounded, it wasn't quite enough to make me wish that I could hear underwater.

Perhaps it's just as well that this is one of my (soon to arrive) birthday presents from C. Maybe a waterproof MP3 player is just what I need to take my mind off the things I'm not thinking about whilst swimming.