When living in a steamy, hot environment where the act of simply breathing causes floods of perspiration to drench every inch of skin, being more active than a lounging lizard was difficult but fortunately, a sparkling swimming pool 5 metres from our front door was the answer.
Not that I'm a strong swimmer, far from it but one baby step (or stroke) at a time with a goal to reach first 10 lengths a day and then who knows, there are no limits!
Now is a good time to mention that our landlady, a grandmother, swims 100 lengths every morning so my target was modest to say the least. I asked her how long the pool is and heard her answer, in her sexy Italian accent - 80 metres.
How proud I was when eventually (not revealing how long it took!) I managed to swim 10 lengths one morning. Wowzer, that's 800 metres, nearly a kilometre. There is definitely no stopping me now!
Proudly I informed HO of my feat. His face was a picture before he burst into raucous bellows of laughter. "80 metres? 80? That pool is barely 20 metres long!" he exploded.
He paced it out.
Eighteen metres.
Paola's sexy Italian English had deceived me. Oh, the disappointment! To have swum less than a quarter of the distance I thought I'd achieved was a bitter pill.
HO's astonishment is that I could look at the pool and think it was anywhere close to 80 metres. My shame is that I can't blame age-related brain cell shrinking. Decades ago my parents shunted me off for career guidance which included some form or other of IQ testing. Even now, I remember my father's fury at the psychologist's report. She couldn't explain my appalling results in the maths section as it was completely incompatible with the rest of my test so I was hauled over the coals for 'pissing about' (he didn't use that phrase, but that was what he meant) during the expensive test.
Even worse is that I fear I may have genetically endowed this number challenge on to No 2 son. He under-achieved spectacularly in a high school entrance exam and only the fact that the school desperately required fee-paying students got him admitted.
But, herein lays the rub. All he needed was the opportunity and he trundled successfully through those school years, achieving a university entrance matric pass. From there, he zoomed through a BSc, BSc Hons and a MSc without pause, and the buck doesn't stop here. A PHd lies in his immediate future, quite a feat for someone who barely scraped 20% in a maths entrance exam.
There's one thing to be said about losing the numbers game, it's not the end of life as we know it - technology is there to overcome our disability!
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| 80 or 18? |
