When I swim, it tends to attract notice: a triumphal progress from the changing rooms in my bathers (the Dawn French specials); a stately procession down the slow lane doing my personal stroke (the one that reminds you that the old name of freestyle was the Australian Crawl). It all looks rather special, partly because I hate putting my face in the water, which, though smelling hygienically of bleach, has always had someone else’s bottom in it quite recently. I know that you are supposed to dive your head under and create less resistance and all that, but for good or ill, my swimming style feels comfy to me even if my head does stick up like the Loch Ness monster. My beloved, who was a champion swimmer in his youth, still cleaves the water like a swordfish, head fully submerged, arms in smooth powerful arcs, feet flipping in an idle-seeming way that gets him there and back and there again while I splosh up one length. He says my swimming is vulgar without being funny and that he will overlook it for the time being because it offsets part of the chocolate that gets eaten round our house by someone who isn’t him. Yet despite all, I enjoy it: swimming is actually fun, unlike walking the dogs, who pull me briskly, ruthlessly, around the park like a pair of boot-camp sergeants.
When I saw Dawn Fraser on Enough Rope (ABC, Mondays, 9.30pm) in early August, looking grey and grandmotherly, it was hard to remember that she had been the greatest swimmer in the world. Being in hot water has always been her style and she is still talking out of turn. ‘Disinvited’ to the Athens Olympics after telling the truth about drug use by Australia’s athletes, she must have felt the familiar sense of being an outcast again. For those of us who can remember, she is no stranger to official nastiness, to being the target of unfair reprisals. When she was punished for pinching the Japanese flag in 1964, the penalty was to ban the world’s greatest swimmer for ten years. Today’s sports bureaucrats were no more magnanimous towards her this August than were yesterday’s batch of faceless, vindictive nobodies, uncaring of the ultimate fate of Australia and its reputation as an open, honest sporting nation. It goes deeper, and wider than just sport: there has to be better