It's (almost) winter now and you won't get me down to the pool any earlier than eight o'clock in he morning. This morning we got there around 8.30. Kerrie-Lee and the other lifeguards were already in attendance, walking round and round the beautiful 35-degree warm-water pool in their upmarket brandnew sneakers which, as they told me, cost them several hundred dollars a pair - and they had several pairs of them!
"Why don't you buy an ordinary pair of plimsolls?" I asked. "A pair of what?" came the reply. Not one of them had ever heard of plimsolls or what some of us commonly called "sandshoes" which had a canvas upper and a flat rubber sole. Am I the only one who is old enough to remember plimsolls?
I still remember a friend from our days on Bougainville Island in the early 1970s who visited me in Canberra in 1992 (or was it 1993?), still wearing the same pair of plimsolls he had worn on the island, except that by then both of his big toes were poking through their canvas top. He'd always been known as a man who had got his money's worth!
I had no time left to ponder this before a butch-looking female gym instructor of uncertain age turned on the loudspeakers, and over the blast of upbeat zumba music ordered everyone not belonging to her 9.15 water aerobics class to get out of the water before at least half of the Bay's geriatric ladies invaded the pool. The only thing to be said in their favour was that probably all of them still remembered plimsolls!
Who derived their name, should you wish to know, from the coloured horizontal band joining the upper to the sole which resembled the Plimsoll line on a ship's hull, because, just like the line on a ship, if water got above the line of the rubber sole, the wearer would get wet.
If you want to read more about the Plimsoll Line, click here
The so-called Plimsoll Line, which indicates the legal limit to which a ship may be loaded for specific water types and temperatures in order to safely maintain buoyancy, came about when the British MP Samuel Plimsoll back in the 1860s blew the whistle on the common practice of overloading ships, and he thus saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
What would have saved us from paying fifteen dollars for a mere thirty minutes in the warm-water pool was the above notice which we only saw on the inside of the door after we had paid for our two tickets.
