“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.”
What this book is
Confessions of the Ageing Swimmers is not a sports novel.
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.
The pool becomes a modern confessional: a place where bodies are exposed, routines repeated, and private thoughts leak into public space.
Why this book exists
Hardly a day goes by without someone being told that their body is wrong — too old, too slow, too visible, too indulgent, too tired.
This book was written to explore how:
- contemporary work treats young people as disposable
- public leisure spaces replace older forms of community and belief
- surveillance, morality, and shame operate in ordinary settings
- sport becomes a proxy for faith, discipline, and redemption
As the preface makes clear, although swimming provides the setting, the book is really concerned with how we live with our bodies, and how institutions tell us what those bodies are for.
The story, briefly
Leo works at the Day One Municipal Leisure Centre, whose slogan promises “A Better You. A Better Family. A Better Britain.” What he encounters instead are:
- petty tyrannies
- humiliating management rituals
- customers who confess more than they intend
- swimmers who age, desire, fail, boast, repent, and repeat
When Leo 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.
Form and structure
The book unfolds in short, episodic chapters, moving between:
- Leo’s internal monologue
- overheard conversations
- absurdly recognisable poolside archetypes
- moments of surreal moral clarity
Part Two is composed of a seven-part poem, Christmas Shopping, conceived originally as a participatory “scattered poem” and later reworked into a kind of secular nativity, complete with improbable witnesses and accidental saints.
The result is a novel that shifts register easily: comic, unsettling, tender, and quietly theological.
Confessions of the Ageing Swimmers sits alongside:
- Confessions of an Ageing Tennis Player — obsession, delusion, ritual
- Confessions of an Aspiring Basketball Player — bodies, measurement, effort
- The Business Allotment — labour, institutions, ethics
- There’s No Such Thing as an Englishman — irritation, identity, public life
Together, these works explore how modern Britain disciplines bodies while pretending not to care about them. Swimming pools, like tennis clubs, gyms, care homes, allotments, and offices, become sites where power is exercised gently — and ruthlessly.
A final note
This is a book about listening.
About what happens when someone young is forced to listen too closely to those who believe they have nothing left to hide.
And about what happens when listening itself becomes dangerous..