Our local, council-owned gym/sports centre is about to close for a six-month-long refit. We can go meanwhile to another of their establishments, but it is inconveniently located and would involve a relatively long journey. But anything more than a ten-minute walk is a real disincentive for someone like me, whose enthusiasm for work-outs is marginal at best, so I have stopped my subscription. Until it reopens I intend to get my exercise quota, free of charge, by more cycling and walking. My Other Half, however, has a much more demanding keep-fit regime and cannot contemplate a gym-free environment. She has signed up with a commercial outfit nearby, one that has upmarket pretensions manifest in its location, slick facilities, fancy lounge-cum-coffee bar and a price tag that is not for the faint-hearted. (In fact, she has appropriated my former subscription to subsidise her new one. The arrangement is by mutual consent.)
I am similarly apathetic about swimming. Although we live just a few steps from the sea and a few hundred metres from an open-air, free-to-use, seawater pool, the stars have to be in a certain alignment before I’m inclined to reach for my trunks. Meanwhile, my OH will have completed her daily triathlon: running, working-out and twenty lengths in the fast lane. I marvel that she has the time and energy for much else, yet she recruited me recently to help out at a couple of environmental ‘actions’ she is involved with.
Sometimes a confluence of events brings about critical mass and lends extra momentum to the progress of a cause. In this case, I cite the water companies’ cynical approach to dumping untreated sewage into the sea and rivers. They’ve been doing it for years, sneaking it in without too many people noticing, but the public has finally caught on and its outrage is rising. So, what changed? Could it be the increasing popularity of wild swimming that has brought so many people face-to-face, literally, with the facts? They are beginning to join ranks with organisations like Surfers Against Sewage, another group of citizen-witnesses to the daily discharges of waste. Environmental activists are showing up on beaches around the country this summer, asking people to sign a petition proposing that the government adopt its plans for cleaning up and regulating the pollution of our waterways. My part in this campaign is supportive. I am deemed too much of a risk to be entrusted with public outreach – the task of approaching people and asking them to sign a petition or take a leaflet. It requires certain skills that are characterised by friendliness and engagement – both of which I can do, up to a point. But I can’t be relied upon to sustain them in the face of obduracy, uninterestedness or worse, hostility. At risk of showing myself up as the Basil Fawlty of public relations, I am best employed fetching and carrying, putting up the banners, fixing broken displays and remaining in the background. (Though, come to think of it, how controversial is the issue of swimming with turds?)
Judging by the number of signatures obtained by the reachers-out this is going to be a big, fat petition, despite the unseasonal weather that has kept so many people away from the beaches. A few sunny weekends should transform it into a jumbo document, capable of impressing upon politicians that the greed of water companies has become a significantly vote-sensitive issue at last.
Of course, while I’m helping out at these events, three things are going through my mind: before you know it, winter will be here and my enthusiasm for cycling and walking will be damped by the weather; if I wasn’t keen on swimming in the sea in the first place, I’m even less so now, knowing what I know; and maybe it’s a capitalist conspiracy to corner us all into paying for gym membership?
No comments:
Post a Comment