Going Swimmingly

My Nicholsons guide tells me that Lee Valley Leisure Pool is a ‘fine facility offering fitness suites, saunas and steam baths’.  Moored in Broxbourne I trot off to get a time-table and find it gone.  In its place is a landscaped area of paths and grassland.  I’m used to Nicholsons singing the praises of pubs which are now empty, boarded up or converted to flats but I would have thought leisure centres would have the decency to hang around a bit longer.  As well as not doing swimming pools Broxbourne doesn’t seem to do food shops so I move back to Cheshunt alongside another part of the lovely Lea Valley Park where wooden sculptures lurk amongst the trees.  Cheshunt has food shops and a leisure centre and a very useful railway station with trains to where I want to go.

At Ware where the charming 18^th Century gazebos line the river there is a 1930’s Lido.  In this weather an open air swimming pool is a delight. I plough up and down the pool as the sun glitters on the water.

Onto Hertford. We are told from Ware onwards that one of the paddles on the lock into Hertford is broken and C&RT are coming to fix it and the lock may be closed for a few days.  As I want to leave the boat for a few days prior to picking up a new crew member I don’t mind. I’m given the information so many times, asked if I have seen the C&RT boat coming up from Enfield, helped at the lock by windlass waving men that I’m beginning to think that a broken lock is the most exciting thing to happen in Hertford for a long time.

The good thing about the lock being liable for closure was that visiting boaters left while they could and we had a choice of moorings alongside the allotments a few minutes walk from the town centre and parks of Hertford.

This morning in Hertford swimming pool resting between lengths I listen to a conversation.

”He said, they said he could speak at the planning meeting but he was only allowed to speak for three minutes.  ‘I’ll be speaking for two minutes’ he said

Well I timed him and I said ‘Do you know Jim that was exactly two minutes’

‘Yes I know’ he said 'I’ve spent days standing in front of the microwave getting the timing right’”

In my survey of the swimming pools along the Lee Navigation I have to, unsurprisingly, give the award for the best to the Olympic Pool. Big and beautiful enhanced by the knowledge of the record breaking sporting feats achieved there and with the added bonus of pausing for breath between lengths and being able to watch the perfectly honed body of Tom Daley twisting and turning as he dived repeatedly from the springboard into the diving pool.