Peter Goers: I love pools. Bring on summer, and all those drippy memories.

Pools are part of the Australian summer – and many of our fondest memories are bobbing around in these blissful waters, writes Peter Goers.

Somewhere near you a swimming pool glistens and beckons. Pools, public and private, large and small, near and far are part of the joy of our eternal summer.

Ah, the life aquatic … I love immersing my grotesquely fat body into a body of water. You’ll be relieved to know my bathers are designed by the Taliban, so they cover as much as possible.

I’m a complete klutz on land but poetry in motion in the water. Not that I’m much in motion even in the water. I still strike out in an elegant stroke if someone’s watching but generally I just loll in the water after a sadly floppy dive and wallow like a hippopotamus. Pools are fun. You can gambol, splash, swim, dive (if it’s deep enough), float, bomb and indulge in horseplay. You can enjoy a more gentle gravity in an alien but welcome element. You can have fun.

In John Cheever’s immortal short story, The Swimmer, a man swims across his suburb from backyard pool to pool and he also swims through his past and into his future. Here’s my go at that and it may encourage you to recall and to look forward to the swims of your life.

I swam at the City Baths of blessed memory (where the Festival Centre plaza once was) only once. I was a kiddie and I imagine my young self after immersion, dripping zinc cream into a strawberry Snip while wrapped in the warm embrace of a Dickies beach towel with fringes. Growing up in Woodville, we lamented that there was no public pool in Woodville and there still ain’t.

We’d go to the serviceable but rather barren Ethelton Pool where I was lucky to do Royal Life Saving classes and learn to recover rubber bricks from the bottom of the pool while fully dressed – skills which have not been of the slightest use yet but may well be.

I did win the silver medal in the Royal Life lobster competition at the new and uncovered Adelaide Aquatic Centre, whereby you propelled yourself down the pool on your back (why? I’ll never know). For many years I was able to swim 100m underwater. It was something to do.

Teach your kids to swim, Peter Goers writes.

I taught swimming year round at the Norwood Indoor Pool, the beautiful Burnside Swimming Centre at Hazelwood Park and my former favourite public pool, the Norwood Pool. The latter has been ruined by the removal of the very popular diving board and so much joy was removed from young lives.

Remember the old sea pool at Henley Beach? I’m a happy chappie in the tidal pool at Edithburgh and the fantastic Bogey Hole in Newcastle (carved out of the cliff by convicts – thank you, convicts) and the natural rock pools on Norfolk and Pitcairn islands.

Many country towns are blessed with public pools – the ones at Bordertown and Spalding are notable examples and the pool at the lovely Roundhouse Motel in Peterborough is a sylvan spot. The chlorinated and grand Naracoorte Swimming Lake is my aquatic sacred site and one of the world’s great swims.

And I’ve swum around the world from the guitar-shaped swimming pool at the Graceland Motel in Memphis to the sea pool at the modern Tropicana Hotel in Havana and the ancient thermal pool in Pamukkale, Turkey, which is as hot as soup and just as welcome. I dived into a huge public pool in Ankara and my bathers came off.

Here’s a bit of fun – at a pool party, people of all ages line up around the pool and play or sing the 1812 Overture and instead of the cannon fire, conduct people to bomb the pool on cue. It’s good, cheap, wet fun.

Be careful with backyard pools. Check your fences and gates. Toddlers can drown quickly and silently. Kids must learn to swim even though it’s much more expensive than it was, but what isn’t? It’s crucial.

Teaching kids to tread water is a very valuable lifesaving skill.

Years ago at the Burnside Pool I was in charge of a class of kids who said they could swim 50m. One boy jumped in and sank. He was retrieved and through his tears he said he thought it was a class for those who wanted to swim 50m. Eventually he did and like him we all want to swim through all our summers. And we can.

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