One Pound Seventy Pence

The swimming pool was remarkably empty this morning. It's been that way all week. Apparently the limit for numbers - so says a notice - is a hundred and four.

If there were a hundred and four people in the pool it would be simply unbearable. This morning, there were about a dozen.

Great for me, of course - in my lane there was me, and a girl in her twenties who swims faster than I do in spite of swimming with the most terrible stroke I've ever seen. Every time I see her I want to ask her why on earth she doesn't have some lessons and become a really good swimmer. But I digress - - -

So I'm in the middle lane - - in the fast lane was my friend Jo and about three others. Everyone else - including my mother - was in the slow lane.

So that's about a dozen people in one of only a handful of municipal swimming pools in a city of six hundred thousand people. It's not very many, it it?

I know it was half past eight on a rainy Sunday morning - - but even so. There used to be more.

So what's happened to them?

They have started charging people over sixty to swim, that's what's happened. It used to be free if you had a Leeds Card.

It's only one pound seventy a time - - but a lot of these older people used to come every day, and now they come a lot less frequently, if at all. They simply can't afford it.

Now I know we live in times of austerity, and this would seem an easy way of generating a bit of money for the Council.

It's a shame, because like my mother, the pool is a place to socialise as well as to swim for a lot of people. And swimming keeps them fit. I think the lack of swimming will cause a greater cost to the National Health Service a few years down the line. I think it's a really short-termist approach.

But, of course, that money will come from a different budget, and nobody will ever discover what difference the swimming, or lack of it, has made to these people's health. I think it's a real shame.