Tales from Tenerife - Pools of stress

Tales from Tenerife
Floating the stress away

I have mentioned it before but I will say it again - life in the Ahab household has been stressful of late. Tilly has been very challenging and the interventions of the Goon Squad have been worse than inept, making a difficult experience absolutely terrible.

All this has delivered scope for stress, gallons and gallons of the stuff which threatens to engulf us in it's sticky tide. Laughter may be the best medicine, but exercise is generally seen as a good preventative, so I am grasping every opportunity to vent all that pent up frustration.

The apartment in Los Gigantes comes complete with access to a rather magnificent communal swimming pool. I know the the communal part could be a bit off putting, but an unexpected benefit of the global recession has been the developers inability to sell most of the apartments, and those few which are owned and very rarely actually occupied (a bit like most narrowboats really). As a result the pool is rarely shared with more than a couple of other people at any one time, and you often have the facility all to yourself.

Each day I showed up at the pool on one or two occasions, doing a solitary 50 / 80 lengths under a golden sun. One problem with swimming is that I am obliged to abandon my glasses and, as a result, my surroundings blend into an impressionist sort of soft focus and I find myself swimming to and fro trying to work out the gender of any sunbathers without appearing to stare! Today I spent 30 minutes labouring under the worrying misapprehension that the thickset German gentleman was in fact a woman with a very ample bosom. Oops. I hope he didn't think I was ogling him.

I am sure that all this exercise is doing me loads of good but, if nothing else, short sighted gender guessing is a great way to disengage myself from events unfurling 2000 miles away.