Lido

There's been some lovely sunshine in Leeds this weekend in spite of it being August Bank Holiday. Roundhay Park looked beautiful yesterday:

All it takes is a bit of open water and some sunshine and I long to be in the water.

Not this water, though, for this is Waterloo Lake, cold and very deep and many people have drowned there, most recently two boys last summer, one of whom died trying to help the other.

No need to swim in the lake, though, because just at the end of the lake is Leeds Lido, a lovely open-air pool built in 1907, rebuilt in the 1930s and always very popular throughout the summer. About a hundred and twenty thousand visitors a year! So let's have a look:

Can you see? Mum and Dad in the big pool, splashing about with their older children: some grown-ups swimming lengths: the toddlers in the little pool with Grandma: Grandad asleep on a deckchair at the side of the pool with a hanky on his head: children skipping on the grass to warm up after their swim. Can you smell that heady mixture of of chlorine, ice-cream and newly-mown grass?

No, neither can I, because the planning morons filled the pool in during nineteen-seventy-something and, having been a nasty piece of waste ground for years, during redevelopment and restoration of the park (HAH!) it's now the sodding Lido Car Park. LIDO CAR PARK for heaven's sake! Mum, Dad, Grandad, Grandma and the kids are all at home playing computer games, eating junk food and creating the epidemic of obesity the media are always going on about.

Those In Charge disapprove of us swimming in rivers now because they say we're all going to DIE if we do: and yet they won't provide facilities for safe open-air swimming. Perhaps if the Lido had still been there those two boys who drowned in Waterloo Lake last summer would have been safely swimming in the pool instead.

For your nearest open-air pool look here. I've just learned that our nearest is Ilkley, which was closed for a while but has now reopened. It's another wonderful childhood memory and still looks just the same: I'll be going there soon.

Meanwhile, a bit of imaginative thinking would get rid of the car park and bring back the pool.