I could just go on and on like this

This is the men's bathing pond at hampstead heath. me and mae have been going to the women's one a lot. The differences between the two are all the ones you would think of, I spose. The men's one is fulled of tanned and smoking gays, and there is a strong sense of We Might Just All Be Here To Have Sex. The women's one is not at all like that. it's not that there aren't a lot of lesbians (there really are), it's just that it's much more earnest and sincere and We Are DEFINITELY Here To Go Swimming. Everyone is reading. 

Things I have seen people reading:

1. A textbook from the Royal Veterinary College

2. Sarah Waters 

3. 100 Outdoor Swims in Great Britain

4. Wolf Hall

5. Healing Through Cranial Osteopathy

5. A Karen Armstrong book about Buddha

7. Jeanette Winterson

8. A book from the Royal Homeopathic Hospital

9. A biography of vita sackville west

There is a woman there every day called The Tinnitus Lady (reading: 100 outdoor swims). She is like something out of an irritating play. You can see that she has decided to become an eccentric in her old age. She wears an adorable straw hat and adorable little plimsolls and a black dress from whistles. Every day at the same time she drinks a teeny little bottle of champagne with lots of smacking of lips and satisfied faces. Basically she is just visibly enjoying being a rich bonkers old woman in a way that gets me down.

She objects strenuously to anyone using their phones in the meadow ("I have tinnitus") or smoking ("I'm extremely irritating"). She does quite stretchy yoga right smack in the middle of where everyone sits. This is terrible to say, but you can sort of see she is one of those people who is much too into the sort of quirks narrative of their lives. lots of doing stuff so she can tell people what a sweetly dotty and yet still flinty intellectual she is ("i said to her, i said, you simply cannot smoke here. and then i drank my champagne and lay with my face to the sun"). 

the other day she whinged for about ten minutes about some girl waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay down from her using her cellphone, and then to show everyone what a nice person she really was, she "engaged" this black girl (reading: the homeopathy book) in conversation and told her IN A VERY LOUD VOICE how much she looked like corrine bailey rae ("you must get that all the time" "...not really").

But despite all the hardships, we soldier on. The main thing about the women's pond is that it is really really great.