When I made the transition to secondary school in the 1980s, one of the big attractions was that the comprehensive I was enrolled at had an outdoor swimming pool. What a treat, I thought to myself. At junior school, all swimming lessons had involved a coach ride down to the local leisure centre in Ashford. There we’d don our pyjamas and dive down to pick up rubber bricks and the such like. Do they still make kids do that? As Peter Kay once quipped: “I’ve still yet to save a black rubber brick from drowning while coincidentally walking past the side of a canal wearing a pair of pyjamas.” The th…
