“Hardly a day goes by without someone telling us off about our bodies: they’re too big, too small, in the wrong place at the wrong time, or they just don’t behave in the way we want them to.”
The recent news of Adam Ramsay-Peaty’s frustrations about his performances at the Commonwealth Games is something us ageing swimmers are only too familiar with. One minute you’re cruising up the lanes, easily outdoing last week’s personal best of 4’33” per 100 metres; the next you’re struggling to find where the showers and dare not bend down to pick up your shampoo just in case you never straighten up again.
Nevermind Adam- you’re following in the best tradition of all us ageing swimmers, namely (and whisper it softly), you’re a bit older than you were yesterday. Your body isn’t quite what it used to be and once, where we witnessed a 25 year old water Ferrari in his prime, we now… well, we now look away discreetly.
Confessions of the Ageing Swimmers is probably the right book for you right now, Adam. It’s a book about bodies in public, about work done under supervision, about rules that are enforced unevenly and about the things people say when they believe no one is listening.
Set in a municipal swimming pool in Nottingham, the novel follows Leo, an eighteen-year-old trainee lifeguard on a six-month probationary contract, trying to survive the last weeks of insecure employment while navigating exhaustion, authority, boredom, desire and moral uncertainty. You may have come across Leo in your travels around the world as you leap, salmon-like, from one pool to another; he, and many like him, has certainly come across you and your compadres, and has heard many tales of tails and more besides. For Leo, the swimming pool becomes a modern confessional: a place where bodies are exposed, routines repeated, and private thoughts leak into public space.
Leo works at the Day One Municipal Leisure Centre, whose slogan promises “A Better You. A Better Family. A Better Britain.” When he discovers a peephole between changing cubicles, and begins to respond, inadvertently, as a kind of secular priest, the novel drifts into darker, stranger territory. By the final chapters, Confessions of the Ageing Swimmers becomes a meditation on confession itself: who is allowed to absolve, who must listen, and what forgiveness looks like when no authority truly deserves it.
Adam, we think you’ll love it – and hopefully it will reassure you as your pace slackens and you look beyond the horizons of the pool, the cubicles and the municipal car park.
Confessions of the Ageing Swimmers
What would you do if you heard someone confess to the most heinous moral crime but there was nothing you could do about it?
