Tuesday, September 30, 2025

The 2025 swimming season finishes - this time for real

Shortly after having written my previous post1 about the end of the swimming season, I discovered that the pool would be open for 'health swimming' on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. The first two days weren't suitable for me, but this morning I had my final swim (definitely) for this year. At 7 am on a cloudy morning, the pool looked a bit different than it does at 8 am (or 8:30 am) on a sunny morning; apart from the life guard and myself, there was only one other swimmer. All the chairs and umbrellas had been packed away.

I had decided in advance to swim 20 lengths - after all, today is a work day, but if I wasn't over-tired after swimming 30 lengths on Saturday, I could knock off 20 today without problem. Towards the end of the swim, I decided that I would swim the final length in backstroke; after all, this used to be my primary stroke when I was young, but these days it takes too much out of me. At first, swimming on my back went well ... until I crashed into the side of the pool. We don't have lane markers, so I had no idea that I was actually swimming in a slight diagonal direction. This left me with about a third of the pool to swim, so I turned over, got into position then finished off the length.

By chance, today was a good example of intermittent fasting. Yesterday I had an appointment with the dental hygienist at 3 pm, a very awkward time regarding eating. I had a slice of cheese and bread at about 12:15 and didn't eat anymore. I wasn't hungry after the appointment, and went to bed early as the treatment had apparently taken a toll on my body. This morning I woke up as usual at 5:30 am (I actually woke up a few minutes before the alarm clock), took the dog for her walk, worked for 30 minutes, went to the pool, swam, came home then showered, so it wasn't until 8 am that I started on my breakfast. That's 20 hours without food. I say to myself that I'm getting in practice for the Yom Kippur fast that starts tomorrow afternoon.

I wrote2 a few days ago about the book "The new spy" by Michael Dylan that I felt was a bit over the top. Over Sunday and Monday I read another book of his, "Rich men, dead men", that is the first book in what is (so far) a trilogy about Dylan's creation, DI Simon Wise (he actually pops up in a cameo role in "The new spy").

This was a better book than "The new spy" and had me guessing until almost the end who the perpetrator of the four murders was. But when I finished the book, I was struck by the thought that the device of having a murderer commit several "unnecessary" murders in order to hide the motive behind the one important (to the murderer) murder was slightly familiar to me. 

At the moment, I can't remember where I might have encountered this device, and the AI program Gemini couldn't point me in the correct direction either. That said, I suspect that one of the four "Hampstead murders" books of Guy Fraser-Simpson used this plot. I'll check this out in the next few days.

Internal links
[1] 2006
[2] 2007



This day in blog history:

Blog #Date TitleTags
1530/09/2005Getting a musical education (2)The Band
10430/09/2007More folktronikMIDI, Steeleye Span, Fairport Convention, Folktronix, The mythical man-month
88830/09/2015Recommended statistics bookDBA, Statistics
107630/09/2017Relaxing foliageAmbient music, Home movies
183130/09/2024If John Le Carre were still aliveIsrael, John Le Carre

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