Dear Editor,
My son, the Angel Andrew, and I exercise upstairs at the leisure centre Mondays, Wednesdays, and Friday; after which we go down to the pool – which, if you’ve read the glowing reports in this paper – has been renovated.
COVERAGE: Pool packed for grand reopening of Maple Ridge Leisure Centre
I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years, so I figure I’m in a position to comment on the changes.
Generally I like the new order, although, the new hot tub is more of a ‘warm tub’: where it used to be 104 degrees, it is now under 100, according to a lifeguard with whom I spoke. This is to accommodate children of all ages.
A shame they couldn’t have built a separate warm tub for the kids.
Not that I don’t like kids – “parboiled” as W.C. Fields once noted.
There’s no danger of them being parboiled in the new ‘warm tub’, rest assured.
I just always thought of the hot tub as an adult refuge, a place to soak away those aches and pains without the clamour of kids splashing about.
Nuff said. Once you’re ready to leave the pool, you can avail yourself of one of the new change rooms – or ‘water closets’ as I like to call them.
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They are laughably small and wet once you turn on the shower.
Best to put your gym bag up on a wall hook or a diaper change table.
Maybe the change rooms were built with women in mind, who, I might speculate, may be more modest than men.
The old male change rooms all had communal showers, four or five in a row; and it is back to one of these, upstairs, that Andy and I return to shower.
I gave the water closets a try for a week. They were wanting.
The new order also has a nudity rule: that being that nudity “below the waist” is not allowed.
This is to make room for Linda Meyer and the twins, and to quash the fear of parents that the male and female genitalia will have a deleterious effect on the emotional development of their children.
The irony here is that the genitalia are responsible for the conception of these kiddies and should be honoured as such.
Maybe we could have an “all nude” day, once a week for the less puritanical among us.
Tim Tyler, Maple Ridge
P.S. – I’m in the nude for love.
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