“He’s added a new dimension to his game” is an expression for how a footballer has improved something to make them a different, better player.

Well, I’ve literally done that now. I’ve gone from 2D to 3D. Precisely at the time in life when one might be doing less lepping and high-jinks on land. 

After a realisation that you’ve just jumped off a wall and you think your kneecaps might emerge through your arse, you think: OK, I’ll have to cut back on the jumping. But I’ve found a new place to head on the old z-axis — the swimming pool.

I’m splashing around, treading water, not panicking in the deep end. 

It’s absurdly late in life. I should have done it earlier. I just never got around to learning how to swim out of my depth. 

I can use my arms and legs in a vague forward motion. I don’t mind my face being in the water. I don’t have a childhood trauma about this.

But for the past nearly half a century, if I couldn’t feel the ground beneath my feet in the water, my brain told my body to do precisely all the wrong things. So I stayed out of 1.5m or deeper.

It’s not a massive deal. I was never that interested in scuba diving. 

But swimming at the beach was always within the very safe zone, and every so often I’d panic that I’d lost my bearings and find I was actually in knee-deep water. 

At the back of my mind, I reckoned I should sort this out one day but never got round to it. 

And the thought creeps in — maybe I’m just one of those people who won’t swim out of their depth.

What’s changed is that my children can now swim enough to be out of their depth, and I was useless to them and worse, not letting them mess around in the deep end because I couldn’t be there with them. 

I’m sure there’s some sort of symbolism here about inflicting your own hang-ups on your children and hindering their progress in life, but I refuse to learn any life lessons from this.

I did get swimming lessons though. In Crumlin a nice woman called Caitlin showed me and nine mostly retirees how to stay afloat over the course of a few weeks, how to dive in and come back up and generally how gravity, legs, water, and arms can work together to keep my body up.

So last Sunday, the children and I went to the pool and went straight down the deep end, and we had the best time. Like we were all the same age. 

Having races. Trying to sit on the bottom, some game my eldest made up called ‘Crocodile’, whose rules I still don’t understand.

Just me hanging out with The Two. It’s an inversion of the normal run of things. As children grow older, you mark the milestones where they start to join you. 

Walks, longer car journeys without breaks, and going to restaurants without an exit plan.

But now it’s me being old enough to join them.

Let’s not get into the weeds of why I didn’t do this before. I could have got lessons at any stage but didn’t. But to quote anyone trying to avoid answering, “Lookit, we are where we are”.

I’m not a lifesaver. I’d still be a liability in a rescue. But at least I wouldn’t waste valuable time saying, “I should have learned to swim”. 

I’d get help faster. And I think I might become one of those people who go swimming in a pool with a deep end.

No problem with kneecaps or hamstrings. Just me in the third dimension.

  • Colm’s eighth book Gallivanting With Words dives into the deep end next week in all good bookshops.