Journey to Oz – the rambling pre-amble Part II

Shark training and pool perverts.

So here our story starts, with me having literally spent the last two and a half years worrying about sharks. From the moment we knew we would be going to Australia, this one thought has consumed me. My first thoughts were that I simply would NOT swim in the sea. ‘We’ve got to swim with sharks!’, Andre teased me. ‘Don’t you want to?’

‘No I fucking don’t!’ I replied, curtly. Oh, this is the part where I warn you slightly too late that this blog will probably have a fair bit of swearing in it. Although, unlike my previous travel blogs, I don’t imagine there’s going to be quite as much discussion about my bowel movements, or what my strange pubic hair is up to these days, so you’re probably alright as long as you can cope with a few swears (sorry, Mother) and descriptions of vicious biters of various kinds.

As the date for our trip gets nearer, the sense of urgency of a need to plan some sort of itinerary is setting in. I am juggling this with keeping our regular lifecasting business ticking along to earn money, assisting Andre with the revamping and strengthening of the Icarus sculpture, supporting our youngen though university exams from a distance, trying not to let the house unravel, my diet unravel, my relationships unravel or my mental state unravel. The last four items on that list were balls that all kinda sorta got dropped along the way.

Unlike previous intense work periods, we have decided NOT to live on coffee and Pot Noodle in the run up to this trip while we are working 16 hour days, and instead to be very organised and sensible and order in batches of healthy nutritionally balanced calories controlled meals that have been prepped for us. This works well other than we are supplementing these nutritional masterpieces by stress-eating large quantities of ice cream most evenings now.

However, we have decided to also try our best to keep up our tri-weekly visits to the local gym, where Andre lifts the heavy things to make his biceps feel like large baked potatoes under his skin and his back look like a giant turkey and/or uterus. He wants to look manly in holiday photos and he is making great progress. He tells me proudly each night that he can do so many reps of weights in great detail that I don’t care about and something called his VO2 on his special sports watch is still a concern. I try to sound interested, but all I can think about is sharks and the fear I have booked us on the wrong plane. Although I recognise the importance of exercise for mental and physical wellbeing, my own reasons for going to the gym are solely to use the pool and get myself shark ready. This is kind of like when you see in women’s magazines each Spring talking about getting ‘beach ready’ or ‘bikini ready’ for Summer, but less about looking good in a bikini and more about staying alive in a bikini.

I have been preparing myself for Australia for months. This is the closest thing I will ever do to training like a proper athlete and I am a little proud of myself. I have been upping my speed and distance incrementally over many weeks now so I am quite a strong swimmer, overtaking most of the other people who train regularly at my local pool. I obviously recognise that I cannot outswim a shark, but I also recognise all I really need to do is outswim the person next to me in the water when the shark comes a-hunting. Poor sucker!

I swim underwater using my mask with the built in snorkel so I do not have to interact with other humans in the pool for as much as possible. Emotional and physical exhaustion is making me increasingly intolerant of my own species. I try as much as I can to avoid going training in the mornings when the filthy pool pervert (aging leerer with a toad belly, skinny legs and baggy shorts) tends to go, but I don’t always have a choice.

Pool pervert is gross. He cannot take his eyes off me, and rubs his crotch through his shorts as I am swimming near him underwater as if he is pinching and rolling the skin on his testicles like someone with a groinal infection. I have asked him politely several times to please stop staring as it makes me uncomfortable. He grinned in a really sinister way to let me know he enjoys making me uncomfortable and stared even more and occasionally slow-motion waves at me to really rub in how many fucks he does not give that I do not feel comfortable with his behaviour.

Complaining about him to staff does nothing. So I cope by passive-aggressively kicking my legs up and down really hard as I pass him in the pool so he gets splashed in the face. Actually there is nothing PASSIVE-aggressive about this. I am now so fed up with the leery pool pervert I am at the aggressive-aggressive stage and reaching the end of my tether. A few weeks ago, I got so fed up with his perving that I actually spoke out loud to him: ‘If you keep staring at me like that I …WILL …SPLASH… YOU!!!’. I was so enraged with him that the last words in that sentence were spat through gritted teeth like some gangster saying ‘I WILL CUT YOU!’ or Liam Neeson saying ‘I WILL FIND YOU AND I WILL KILL YOU!’. But threatening to splash a pensioner in the local swimming pool is as confrontational as I get, even severely provoked for years and years. Nevertheless I’m not proud. This is what work tension, lack of sleep and peri-menopause have brought me to. I need this holiday in Australia more than you could know, before I get kicked out of my own gym and shamed in the local newspaper for losing my shit one day and brutally beating that lustful geriatric to death with a pool noodle.

So getting back to holiday preparations…as much as possible lately I’ve been in a good routine – working hard, eating well, training hard. My training consists of lane swimming for half an hour at speed, a tiny bit of pilates in the sauna, and mental visualisation exercises to prepare me for swimming with sharks.

For weeks I have been watching sharks on Youtube, sharks on Netflix, sharks on Amazon Prime. I have been binge-reading shark attack statistics for Australia. I know what shark body language means, when they hunt, what they hunt, which sharks are the most dangerous to men. I also now know just how dangerous to sharks MEN are, and have actually started feeling rather sorry for sharks as a result. I have learned with interest that I’m more likely to die playing ping pong than being eaten by a shark. I try to imagine some famous film director creating a Jaws-scale terrifying horror film about the dangers of ping pong and really can’t envisage it at all. So I compare shark deaths to deaths from cows, deaths from domestic dog attacks, deaths from bumble bee stings. As it turns out, the chances of being eaten by a shark, even in heavily shark-infested waters in Australia are pretty darn slim compared to being licked to death by my own sweet dog, Teddy Spaghetti. This is reassuring.

It is also reassuring to read that most sharks really don’t like the taste of humans and when we do get bitten, it’s usually a case of mis-identification. They think we look like a juicy seal or something. I find my anxiety creeping back up. My swimming suit is black and shiny. My wet suit is black. My arse and thighs are ample, despite months of dieting. I will look like a sodding seal!!!

So I start to do my research to find the perfect shark-repellant swim suit. I read about some surfers who designed some very particular prints that are supposed to put the shark off. One looks like the weird aura I get in my left eye when I’m getting a migraine, the other looks like the duvet cover I had back in the 1980s when I still thought neon colours and Kajagoogoo were awesome. I realise that the one thing I fear more than being eaten to death by a hungry shark is being pointed and laughed at by other people who think I look like a cross between a mime artist and Jason Donavon’s nan’s sofa in Neighbours. So I keep researching.

Apparently sharks are attracted to a) anything shiny (they think it is a fish), b) anything with bold colours, c) anything with strong contrasts, d) basically any design of swimsuit I can actually find. Bright prints are out, metallics, black because I look like a seal or white because of the strong contrast against my skin if I get a tan. I could basically get a completely flesh coloured swimsuit but then a) I would look butt naked to any Australian pool/sea perverts and b) I might just look like a large lump of delicious raw meat swimming through the sea to a shark. I could get a paleish swimsuit with a subtle pattern like small peach flowers on a grey background but then I would look like the world’s biggest frump and repel my own boyfriend not just the sharks. Or as my cousin Soph, who lives in Australia and knows about these things, suggested, I could get something to mimmic the look of a venomous sea snake, as the sharks will avoid these. Ah ha! I think…and start looking for sea-snake inspired suits, only to find out in my research that SOME sharks quite like eating sea snakes. Bugger!

So I continue training harder to distract myself. And now my training includes swimming an entire length of the pool underwater with my breath held the whole way. Within a few days I can do this with relative ease and no embarrassing gasping at the other end of the pool. My thinking is that if a shark grabs me by the ankle and pulls me down or along I will need to be able to hold my breath for some time whilst kicking with my non-munched leg and spinning round to poke the shark in the eyes/gills/sensitive parts of the nose, so these lung strengthening exercises are absolutely vital.

I practice doing water punches as I swim along, imagining bopping a shark on the nose as hard as I can, then realise how weird I must look to anyone else watching me in the pool. But this is important stuff and if anything it is making the pool pervert take my threat to splash him more seriously. I consider getting some sort of James Bond villain style spiked ring for defending myself underwater and then realise such things are probably illegal and hard to smuggle into Australia. Plus sharks are endangered and I really must stop thinking of them as the enemy. I must be at one with nature and not so quick to judge it.

So I go back to more shark documentaries and watch many many hours of footage of humans swimming safely (ish) with sharks. I swim up and down the pool visualising sharks swimming just a few metres beneath me and trying to pretend I am calm about this. Being an artist with a good imagination I can visualise them very easily. I practice controlling my breathing, pretending I am OK with this vision, even though I am not. Then one of the documentaries mentions that sharks are so sensitive they can feel the quickening of a small fish’s heart that’s hiding several metres away from them under a rock. There is no way I’m going to fool one that I’m calm. I can’t control my heart from quickening when I take the car over 38 miles an hour let alone anything more stressful.

And then I heard it. The one thing that has helped me get a grip and calm right down in all this time of training. That blooming terrible ‘Baby Shark’ song that has gone viral. Now it’s in my head like a disease I cannot dislodge. I find it IMPOSSIBLE to think about sharks of any kind or size without them being accompanied by this ridiculously silly theme tune. Baby shark – doo doo doo doo doo dooo, grandma shark doo doo doo doo doo doo, etc etc. No amount of footage of Great Whites ripping into bloody bait in closeup with their mammoth jaws a-gnashing is enough to dislodge this really really annoying song from my head. It is now impossible to take sharks seriously. My shark phobia has been neutralised by a nursery school song with annoying accompanying hand actions. But hey! Whatever works, eh?

I decide at the very last minute on a blood red swimsuit and be done with it. Sophie says I will look like lunch in red, but I figure I’ll still be wearing a black wetsuit over the top anyway in the style of delicious seal cosplay, so….fuck it, I may as well die looking like a slightly dumpy, middle aged Pamela Anderson underneath that. If I get time before we go, I might even paint my toenails a matching red, so people can easily identify my missing foot when they pull it half-eaten from the shark’s stomach at a later date.

I’m as psychologically prepared for this trip as I’m ever going to be. Now we just have to get the sculpture there and do our job so I can die happy. I feel quite zen. I have finally made peace with the prospect of my possible impending death by being eaten by a shark. I have, however, not had time to do anything to quell my phobia of…driving on the motorway to the airport, flying, leaving my (young adult) child home alone for three weeks, missing my connecting flight from Singapore, my back injuries playing up on the long haul flights, me messing up the travel arrangements, forgetting to pack something vital, being bitten by giant poisonous swimming lizards (yes, they are a thing too), being bitten by a venomous snake, being eaten by crocodiles, being bitten by a venomous spider, Andre being bitten by ANY spider (he is allergic and swells up ever since he got munched by a Recluse spider in Florida), poisonous centipedes the size of small dogs, drunk feisty kangaroos that want to punch you, drowning in a rip tide, generally drowning, having a panic attack when I see something scary in the water causing myself to have an asthma attack leading me to drown, getting sunburnt, looking fat in photographs, and being able to find toilets.

So I’ve got plenty to keep me on my toes over the next three weeks. And my only regret so far is that I didn’t spot THIS swimsuit from Beautiful Halo in time to order it for this trip, because this would have been the absolute winner. Particularly with my perimenopausal mum-tum and back fat oozing out of the shark’s teeth like it’s just eaten a vanilla blancmange. Still…there’s always next year.

……That bloody song is still stuck in my head. How about you?

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