There and back, of course - and that's without any literary allusion to Barry Crump's book - when we used to drive all the way to the Ulladulla indoor pool for our weekly aquatherapy.
Now the New Batemans Bay Indoor Aquatic Centre is right on our doorstep, and it is so much bigger and better! We made an early start and were in the therapeutic always-at-34-degrees warm water pool before 8 o'clock in the morning, and so had the pool all to ourselves.
And that's just the small pool! The main pool is twice as big! And then there are waterslides and gyms and yoga rooms and a café to let you put back all of the weight you may have lost by going to all of them.
It was bliss! And yet by eleven we had to tear ourselves away as I had an appointment with my GP who'd give me the results from my bloodtest.
"Your cholesterols are too high", he told me. "At their current level and at your age, you are in danger of a heart attack or a stroke and could be dead within five years." Really? What else is new when you're just days away from seventy-seven? But since he's probably on a commission with Big Pharma, I let him prescribe me CROSUVA for the next six months. "Take one in the evening, and see me again in six months' time", he said.
I don't know how many cholesterols were in the king prawns with garlic and pepper sauce and rice which is my usual lunch at the Sawatdee Thai Restaurant, but after all the aquatic work-out it went down a treat.
To top off the day, we popped into Vinnies where I picked up Andrew Wheatcroft's "Infidels - A History of the Conflict between Christendom and Islam", "Leviathan or The Whale" by Philip Hoare which is all about whaling and Herman Melville, and "Every Man for Himself" by Beryl Bainbridge, a fictionalised account of the sinking of the Titanic. And at the post office awaited me a small parcel containing Robert Lacey's "Inside the Kingdom" which I had ordered on ebay from the U.K.
And that's it for another day in retirement! If the cholesterols don't get me, I might die a watery death in the new Aquatic Centre, or one of my many overloaded bookshelves will collapse on me. What a way to go!
