In more of my obsessive rambling about the pool that’s now shut, (original photos, second gallery, third gallery, another rambly post about it), I spent a long time last night talking to Trey about it.
I guess, or I think… When my dad died a few months ago, I had a lot of anger, a lot of hurt, and I needed some space to work that out in. Bristol North, because I’d just learned to swim, provided that space. I could beat crap out of the water (almost literally given the level of maintainance it’d had), I could swim until I was tired, too tired to care, and I could swim along the bottom of the pool in a silence and at a level of concentration which I just couldn’t get anywhere else.
It ridded my mind of the struggle to cope. All I had to do was swim. All I could do was swim.
And that place, that place was the kind of building my father would have loved. All function and form, beauty as part of the design. None of this bland utilitarian modernism. Quality as a function of longevity, not quality as a function of price.
And perhaps that’s why I’m so attached to it.
Or perhaps I’m attached to it because I have no desire to move into the modern world. And “getting real” is something I’d rather not do.
