65 million years ago, a great change happened. One of the greatest mass extinction events ever to take place in the 4 billion year-long history of our planet. The biggest reptiles ever to have lived were killed in a geological instant, after a reign of hundreds of millions of years, allowing the tiny proto-primates to emerge from their hideaway niches in the ground cover and canopy, and start breeding, free from the predators in whose shadows they had survived for aeons.
Then for a long while, everything plodded along nicely.
Until Thursday 2nd July 2009.
A distant descendant of one of these proto-primates walked, with his easy-going buddy, Seb, into a leisure centre in Essex. They both paid their money, and went through. After donning their super hi-tech swimming gear (which, incidentally, was the pinnacle of technology. From the moment the first Ape-like creature, itself a descendant of the aforementioned proto-primates, used a stone tool to crack open a palm nut, each subsequent development in insight and imagination had been leading up to the day the first Speedo Aquablade Hydroshorts went on sale; the day of the ultimate Eureka), they entered the pool area. Seb hopped in the shallow end, as always, and Tom (for it was he) headed up to the deep end, as usual, in order to dive back into the elemental pond from which his long-distant ancestors first crawled. His path was blocked by two distant granddaughters of the the tiny mammal that outlived the dinosaurs. He saw them as Homo sapiens sapiens lifeguardii.
"No diving anymore, mate" said one of them.
Tom was stunned. "Wha- Why not?!" he spluttered, undoing hundreds of thousands of years of the cultural evolution that led to humankind's perfection of verbal communication.
"They've just had a review of the regulations, and now the minimum depth for diving is 2.5 metres, and not 2 metres, like before." she explained concisely.
And so it was, my friends (for now I will stop writing in the third person), that I had to crawl into the shallow end like a primitive tetrapod fish-like creature who, after using his swim bladder as a makeshift lung for a few days, thought that perhaps life on land wasn't for him after all.
I realised after my swim that, even though the influence of exercise-induced endorphins was lifting my mood, it was not to such a great extent as it had been before, when the sudden plunge from air to water would hit me like a delicious drug-fuelled delirium.
Another thing that made this swim one of the least fulfilling, was the very large man I shared a lane with, whose sheer mass would displace the water to such an extent every time we passed each other, that I almost drowned many times. This human wave-machine made sure I had my five portions of Chlorinated water that doctors don't recommend*.
Seb and I lolled off after the swim, to the local park, where we sat on the swastika-decorated swings, and watched the sun sink out of a clear summer sky as we wallowed in self pity.
*Now I've gone insane.
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