End of story

I GOT angry about something the other day - I forget what it was - and my eyeballs were hard and glassy with rage for several hours afterwards. During that time I took myself and my hard, glassy eyeballs to the local leisure centre for a swim.

In the brightly lit men's changing room, I took off my clothes and flung them, one by one, as if I were flinging wooden balls at a coconut shy, into the locker. Beside me, two elderly men had just completed their regular, early-morning swim ("Well, that's that till tomorrow, Peter") and were slowly getting dressed. I was conscious of their glances at my unusual behaviour.

They were talking about the war. In particular how, at the height of the London blitz, the German bombers would generally arrive just before midnight.

"Damned nuisance it was," said Peter. "Turning up like that just when every normal, civilised, human being was thinking about going to bed."

"Well, they did have a long way to come, I suppose," said the other.

"True," agreed Peter. His tone of voice suggested that he hadn't looked at it from the Luftwaffe's point of view before, and now that he had, he regretted being quite so hard on them.

Then I was conscious of a little maelstrom of panic and bewilderment coming from their direction. The one that wasn't called Peter couldn't find his shoes. Peering first into his empty locker then at the floor underneath his bench, he said: "That's strange, Peter. I had them in my hand only a minute ago." One couldn't help feeling sorry for him. It had obviously been an extremely laborious and time-consuming business getting himself dry and putting his clothes back on, and he was almost there. He only had his socks and shoes to go and this happened.

After several panic-stricken but ultimately fruitless sweeps of the changing area and the shower cubicles, and having investigated each of three hundred empty lockers at a rough estimate, three possible explanations seemed to present themselves to this bewildered, barefooted old gentleman.

Either Peter had uncharacteristically hidden his shoes when his back was turned, or I had, or they had been inexplicably removed from the changing rooms by some means that was independent of human agency. "I had them in my hands only a minute ago," he kept saying to himself plaintively. "I say, I'm sorry to trouble you," he said to me as I was stepping into my trunks, "but you haven't seen my shoes by any chance, have you?"

I brought my hard, glassy eyeballs to bear on his gentle, bewildered ones.

"No," I said, as if anything belonging to him would be beneath my notice in any case.

"I'm afraid I must be going mad, then," said the poor man.

I didn't contradict him.

The pool was quite full for a weekday morning: mothers and babies in the shallow end; a convivial group of "people with learning difficulties"; some geriatrics suspended here and there in the water as if they motiveless pieces of plankton. I slipped gently into the water, pulled my goggles over my eyes, adjusted my hat and pushed off.

I can only do the breast stroke, but I pride myself on doing it rather well. What really annoys me are those front-crawl swimmers who swim up and down in straight lines, doing flashy tumble-turns at either end, expecting the rest of us mugs to get out of their way if we see them coming. If they are swimming for the sake of fitness, why can't they bring themselves to swim an extra yard or two by circumnavigating the less able? That's what I want to know. I have seen some of these undeviating front-crawlers park their cars as close to the leisure centre as possible so that they don't have to walk as far to the changing rooms and back. That's the type of people they are.

I felt much better for my swim. I did my usual 30 or 40 lengths of breast- stroke. Then I swam on my back until I knocked heads with a person with learning difficulties coming the other way, and we exchanged information about ourselves as we trod water, including names and addresses and which car we'd buy if money were no object.

When I got out, the first thing I did was go and look at my face in the mirror. My eyes were no longer glassy and hard - they were puffy and tired- looking instead. I showered and went to get my clothes out of my locker. At the bottom I found two pairs of shoes. One of which definitely wasn't mine.