Going to the Pool, or A Note on Discriminatory Consumerism

Today I went swimming, having too much energy to burn and a day off ahead of me I was not sure what to with, especially before seeing the The Bourne Ultimatum tonight.
This may seem a quite insignificant action, unworthy of commenting about. Yet in my North-West England, such a blunt, on-the-spot, last-minute decision is not easy to implement. First you have to choose the time you are going. Yes it is the summer and yet it is more than ever a fight to go swimming. throughout the day the ppol is booked through: 'kid swimming summer', 'active lunchtime swim', 'general social swim', 'elderly well-being swim', 'aquanatal swim'... You get it: if you want to go swimming, you need first to recognise your criteria for eligibility as a swimmer, then choose your time to go, don't be late or you will miss on your fee of £2.20, then present yourself and get change in the special changing rooms of the pool, which, God forbids, are quite alike seaside peep-show changing cabins as in Benny Hill. After all these actions, ready and dressed up for the pool, you will be allowed to go swimming... in a pool packed with a mixture of people, paradoxically, of all kinds. Not what you were being told by the official programme.
Indeed, you will, however, probably, not swim much, or as less as you expected, as far as most people do not get the idea that you should stick yourself to a sector of people swimming at your pace, i.e. not tring to swim in the lanes where the good rapid swimmers are showing off if you are a slow swimmer, or vice versa. I am not speaking of a 'social general swim' session here, but more generally. Even during 'lunchtime active swim' time, the pool is crammed with all speeds-swimmers.
If it was about a 'social general swim', this would be clearer. Indeed, social general swims are not for swimming. They are a pretext to splash out some water around, pretending to do some exercise, so as to apologise oneself for the Snickers, or few odd drinks surely to be enjoyed later in the day or evening. Waiting for you straight outside the pool there is the compulsory junk food machine ready to serve such delicacies.
Strictly speaking, 'active lunchtime swims' are the only swimming sessions accessible. Yet they are also the least active swimming sessions I have seen taking place in that pool. During lunchtime, be careful not on Fridays as it is for pregnant women only as I have been told and barred the access when replying I was not pregnant, people go to the pool to rapidly, swiftly, consume a swim, that is, inserting a time of pretended exercise in their day, filled up with much less healthy habits such as eating pies and driving, rather than walking, to the supermarket. First there are the corporate people who get there quite largely after the beginning of the allocated hour, jumping and splashing a few lengths, and hophop out of the pool back to work or whatever they are doing. Second, there are the elderly ladies, in search of something to keep their day busy and decide to enjoy it swimming very slowly for the full hour. Third, there are the jumping bonker ones who have just burnt thousands of calories at the next door gym and jump in and out to refresh, not without showing off and looking down with disdain at those other unfit people they have to suffer sharing their pool with. Fourth, you have the odd normal, nor fit or unfit, nor big or skinny, people like me, who work asocial hours, that is, evenings and week-ends and look out for some opportunity to get some exercise done, and keep active instead of sitting at home watching daytime television. And we cannot really swim in the middle of this splashing out exercise. Irritatingly, I gave up trying to swim after my 40 minutes today. I will come back, though carefully avoiding the Monday lunch - filled with enthusiasts willing to burn out their hungover of the week-end - as well as Friday as it is for pregnant women only.
Oddly, the early Sunday morning social general swim is a good time to go swimming. At that time, kids are still in bed, showing-off w****** are showing their pecs to their partners in bed, and, as for those who go swimming pretending to be on a diet, they are also still in bed moaning against the harshness of their life. Those who are there are often nice people looking out for some nice active relaxing time, some gently reaching out the 50-lengths mark, this without splashing out your face with water every two minutes, others as gently slowly achieving a 10-lengths mark, slowly with lots of breaks in between. You get it: Going swimming is not an easy entreprise at my pool, except maybe on Sunday mornings.

Today was more of a shocker than usual. There is a new rule in the house. Apparently there were too many people pretending to do what they were not, paying the small pool fee, and then accidentally redirecting their feet towards the gym instead, of, as you will have guessed, much higher fee. Or to the sauna. There are cheaters everywhere, including at the pool. to wvoid such misdemeanour, and the financial difficulties this entails for the leisure centre, a new measure has been created, that of allocating each customer with a special band wrist of which colour is supposed to mean the physical activity you are buying out. My first wristband, this Sunday when I needed to burn out to get some emotional stability, was ready and was gently given to me, which I gently put in my wallet not realising the financial super-importance of the object. Today was different. Before I could say a word the woman at the counter, who strongly reminded me not to go into the pool before 12 o'clock sharp, authoritatively put the bloody wristband around my wrist without asking, sealing it, and this irritates me a lot, at a length that made it some sort of loose bracelet dancing around my arm. So there I was with my bright yellow bracelet, which I ended up taking off while trying to adjust it to my too small wrist size. While swimming, again to calm down the emotional tempest that rages in me, I could not help but notice that we were all marked with such ungorgeous colourful bands, red for those coming out of the gym, yellow for those for a swim session only, blue for those going to the sauna, and could not help thinking about the kind of world this reflects, where we live to be categorised, cast into drawers, without access to each other unless we are rich enough to buy the white band that will cover to access all areas of our leisure centres and social world. Bands, if I am to believe my recent pool experience, are the new class system. As staff till registration numbers are in the restaurant where I work. Maybe I should not be so pessimistic, being unhealthy seems to be a common category that goes under all wristbands. In the same time, most of us at work know some of the managers's till numbers so that we can in fact manage ourselves, trusted.