Join the lah-dee-dah swimming-pool club? No thanks

Here’s how successful and glamorous my life has become: I personally know at least two or three people who have houses with swimming pools. And these are not people I “know” because I read about them in a magazine: these are actual friends who have actual swimming pools that I have actually swum in.  And they own their pools all year round: they don’t just hire them for the weekend to impress me.  Sorry if this is all sounding a bit boastful and smug but I can’t help being the high-achiever that I am, deal with it.

So because I’ve been hanging out with the lah-dee-dah swimming-pool set, I’ve become a bit swimming-pool-aspirational, I’ve been craving a swimming pool of my own, even though my friends try and talk me out of it.  They say “Don’t do it, Danny.  It’s expensive, it’s a pain to keep clean, we only use it a handful of days each year, and it takes up the whole backyard. Worst mistake we ever made. To be honest we’re thinking of filling it in” and then they give me a sad-face look and I want to hug them because their lives are so hard.

But I couldn’t let go of my dream, I was un-talk-out-able about it, so my beloved and I finally agreed to get one.  We scrimped and saved for ages, and this summer we bought our very own swimming pool – and by “pool” I mean a cheap no-brand lime-green inflatable kiddie’s pool.  And by “swimming” I mean sitting in a few centimetres of tepid tap water contaminated with leaves, dead bugs and toxic algal blooms.

On hot days I head into the backyard with my towel and sunscreen and I fill up my pool with a garden hose (you have to refill it with fresh water every couple of days because there’s no filter.  And you have to repump it with fresh air every couple of hours because it has a cheap no-brand blow-up-valve).  Then I sit in my pool, relax in my pool, cool down in my pool, do laps of my pool.  And every ten minutes I get my kitchen sieve and scoop out hundreds of drowned flying-ant-things who commit suicide in my pool, clearly unable to endure one more depressing moment of their painfully-long 24-hour lifespans.   Sometimes I even grab my snorkel and mask and lie face-down in my pool, trying to catch sight of the beautiful tropical underwater creatures – the Great Southern Bronzed Sinker (Overhead-Branchus PossumTurdus) and the Pale Tapered Dwarf Darter (StudentShareHouseholdNeighbourus Overfence Spliff-Chuckus).

My swimming-pool-friends are wrong wrong wrong; this swimming pool has been the best thing we’ve ever done.  It’s made the summer more bearable, it’s made the backyard more resorty, it’s brought our family closer together because when the kids get into the pool with us, we all squish up tight, sitting top-to-toe like chicken drumsticks in a Coles 1.2 Kilo Value Pack.

Then yesterday we got a water bill for $550. To be honest, we’re thinking of filling it in.

Danny Katz is a newspaper columnist, a Modern Guru, and the author of the Little Lunch books for kids, now a new TV series on ABC3.