TEEN GAY SEX STORIES OF COUSINS AND FAMILY FULL
If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a changing village full of children to drive an adult completely mad. That's a bit of "progress"that makes my heart sink – the changing village. What private gyms don't tend to have are mixed changing rooms. Like I was offering very niche services on an Amsterdam street. I sat on a bench, knees pressed to the glass door, staring out at people, a tragic shop-window display. Sometimes they have extra little features that don't quite work – I went to one that had a mini-sauna in what I bet used to be a cupboard. But that doesn't mean all private gyms have nice changing rooms. It's not a shocking revelation to say you're more likely to find a decent changing room in a private gym. So you get given a padlock, lock your glasses in your locker, then can't see to open the bloody thing again.
"Did you bring your own padlock?" No, I tend not to carry such things about my person. Then unless you put another 20p in, you have to leave it open while you shower. You open your locker and get your shower stuff. Council posters featuring young people looking at you with haunted eyes. Puddles of lukewarm stagnant water of dubious provenance on the floor. Tiny graffitied cubicles that you can't sit down or turn around in. You can almost see the veruccas lying in wait on the grubby beige tiled floors (or maybe those are bits of rice cake). Clumps of matted black hair in the drains. Then there are the mouldy showers with damp plastic curtains that glue to your skin. The worst changing rooms have a very particular smell, similar to the tigers' enclosure in the zoo after a downpour, a feral urine/wet hay fusion. I once saw someone blow-drying their feet, but I'm sure readers will have seen weirder. Oh if it weren't for that sign … " Being suggestible, the idea of checking out whether my fellow bathers were "famous" hadn't occurred to me until then to be honest, Pippa Middleton could have been flossing her bits and I'd have been hard pushed to care less. "There's Jennifer Aniston in her scanties. At a Virgin gym, I saw a "No paparazzi!" sign, again presumably because if you're a paparazzo, a sign would be enough to deter you from your mission. If it hadn't been for that sign, I'd have been hawking (yes, that word again, it means bringing up phlegm) and scything through my undergrowth with great enthusiasm. "No spitting, no shaving" has been my favourite to date (at Tooting Leisure Centre, for completists). The signs pool management need to put up in changing rooms usually give you an idea of the kind of thing patrons would be up to, if they could. And having once got changed out of a wetsuit in a minibus with nine other people I hardly knew after a swim in a glacial lake in freezing rain, you'd imagine I'd be loth to moan about basic facilities. I've been around long enough to see "progress" that sometimes doesn't feel like that. I've also swum where there were no changing rooms – it's the downside to "wild" swimming (or upside when you consider the state of some of them).
I 've been to many changing rooms in my long and (ahem) illustrious swimming life I hope I have seen the worst and suspect I'll never see the best.