First Aid

For those of you who know him, and/or are interested, this is Laurence's latest tattoo, which I tried to pretend indifference to, then tried to dissuade him from getting, then asked him at least to wait until Sleepy was here, whose advice with regard to tattoos he has previously listened to and taken, but no.
So here it is, he insisted I should photograph it so everyone could see it.
Hear me sigh.

You know, it pisses me off when there's no way of getting information except from people who are in the know.
I was scheduled to go on the First Aid course today and it was at City Hall. I assumed straight off that there was nowhere to park at City Hall, and in fact Kris at work said to me that the only place you could park all day was on the top floor of the Cultural Centre's car park.
And halfway through the morning, people had to rush out and re-park their cars because their three hours was up. Yet the person who organised this course, who works at City Hall, must have had this information, but didn't think it might be nice to pass it on.

The other thing that it was impossible to do was to get up or down in the lift at City Hall without being a city employee. So everytime I or any of the others who also didn't actually work there needed to do so, we had to wait for a grown-up with a pass to operate the lift. It was the same for the doors on the stairs.
Peasants.

The day was however, fun. Our instructor was Dave the Fireman. He had a level of literacy similar to Derek Zoolander, for example he wrote on the board 'your' when it should have been 'you're' amongst other similar faux pas.
He also repeatedly failed to acknowledge the existence of adverbs and actually wanted us to repeat the words, 'if someone isn't breathing good enough,' - there, you see the Derek Zoolander similarity?
But he WAS a good instructor and he made it fun. And seriously, CPR and artificial respiration are just NOT fun. The day went quickly. There was a written test at the end, which Fireman Dave didn't approve of so he went out of the room so that we could confer over the answers - just as well for me, many of them seemed ambiguous, several seemed to be contrary to what we had just learnt and others were not covered by the course at all, but between us we got them all, and since we marked them ourselves, we could have filled them in at the end. Fireman Dave had already given out the certificates anyway.
Dave had research to back up his dislike of the written test. It seems that as we get older, so our performance in test situations is increasingly adversely affected by stress. He was good at making us feel there was no stress.

Another course participant, a recent immigrant was working as a security guard when he had three separate degrees in computer science from an American university.
I can't imagine why he had moved to Canada apart from the fact that his name was Mohammed which could be a bit of a handicap in the current climate.

After the course, since I was parked right opposite the 'Aquatic Centre' which you might think would be some kind of aquarium, I went swimming. I had brought my swimming stuff - which presumably will soon be known as my 'swim stuff'- because I knew I would be near there. (Some people here, and I emphasise some, refer to a waiting list as a 'wait list' and I noticed that the changing room for the pool was called a 'change room'.)
Philistines.

The Aquatic Centre turned out to be less lovely on the inside than it appeared from the outside. Only one of the several pools was open. This was a main pool with two lanes sectioned off for people who actually went to the swimming pool to swim.
Or to the swim pool to swim.
But I'm ahead of myself. To start with I would have suffered extreme embarrassment were it not for the fact that only I spoke English.
I thought I was being helpful when I tried to stop a gentleman from going into the ladies' toilet.
'This is the ladies',' said I helpfully. When he replied to me in some version of Chinese I grasped from the timbre of his voice that he was in fact a she.

The changing room was pitiful. It was also ..... full of fat, naked Chinese women. This is one of the few situations in life when a person can sincerely thank the Great Goddess for myopia.
It seems so strange to me. The Chinese at times seem such very private people, Kevin has found that co-workers will rarely talk about their personal lives. On the other hand these women seemed completely unabashed at performing quite intimate washing and drying operations in public.

In the pool, things were no better. Well, no, to be fair, they all were clothed, and really, more clothed than many white people. Not for the Chinese gentleman the closely fitting Speedo.
Gott sei Dank.
But they had noodles. Now, I've never actually seen these things in Britain, but that's not to say they don't exist. These are brightly coloured pieces of tubing made from some kind of hard foam rubber, the kind that has replaced polystyrene as packaging material.
I had seen them in Stupor-store, and had been told they were 'pool noodles' but never seen one in operation. The lady I had tried to stop from going into the ladies' toilet had one making a U-shape under her crotch. I have no idea whether these things keep you afloat or whether there is some kind of outrageous use for them that I don't even want to think about, but they didn't seem to be in short supply.

There were rules for the pool. You stay to the right when swimming down your lane, do not stand at the end, but turn and swim back, keeping to the right. If you were in the playing-around part of the pool, you didn't interfere with the swimming part.
All of these rules were displayed in big, clear writing. And had people followed the rules, all would have gone well, but no, of course they didn't, so I did my 20 lengths as best I could and then got out.

I went to my locker to take out my towel and shower gel. But wait! The locker system is quite different here. The quarter that I had put in was not returned to me as in every other swimming pool I've ever been to, no, in order to get my stuff while leaving my clothes in the locker, I had to find another quarter.
And then of course, the other dilemma. Was I to be the prissy little Englishwoman who alone kept her cossie on in the communal showers?

Damn right.