OK, not the sort of grumble to invite much sympathy. Symbol of privilege and all that. But it is a melancholy discovery all the same: your garden might be better off without a swimming pool.
Upon moving to Johannesburg it is of course love at first sight. Who on a scorching summer afternoon could not fall for the rectangle of azure water glinting amid the shrubbery?
Some people have a pool where you can do lengths but most settle for the splashing kind, effectively a big outdoor bathtub in which you recline, sip gin and tonics and watch sunsets.
That’s the fantasy. The reality is that on the hottest day many pools remain undisturbed, still, forgotten.
The exotic explanation is an aversion to the risk of sharp pain and absent body parts. Seeing nobody in the pool does not mean it is empty.
This is Africa. Dangerous creatures roam and take the odd dip.
”My little daughter and I sometimes go for a swim at night, but from now on I will look very carefully first,” Frans Nienaber, a Pretoria resident, told the local press last month.
”At first I thought it was a leguaan [iguana]. I fetched a flashlight and shone it into the pool — then I saw it was a crocodile. I was quite shocked.”
Pieter Brouwer, a herpetologist specialising in the study of reptiles, was summoned and dived in, retrieving a young female Nile crocodile weighing just 5kg.
”I was a little scared. Even at that small size a crocodile can do some serious damage to a human hand,” Brouwer said.
He should count himself lucky he was not summoned by my friend in Johannesburg who recently found a scorpion floating in her pool. She plopped the corpse in a jar only to discover it very much jiggly and alive.
Throw in the tales of giant frogs and snakes lurking in the deep end and it becomes clear why some want to pull the plug on a slithering, stinging, biting ecosystem in their garden.
The other explanation for pool boycotts is that that azure glint can overnight give way to green murk after one of the city’s spectacular summer thunderstorms. You can restore it with chlorine, acid and salt but must get the balance right. Overdo the chemicals and it is like plunging into a vat of Fairy Liquid.
Hence a rite of passage in the wealthy northern suburbs is scooping up a sample and visiting the pool shop for scientific analysis in the laboratory by people in white coats.
Arguably they would be better employed locking up victims of such madness: all that hassle and expense and for half the year it is too cold to dip in a toe.
So why bother? Why have a pool at all? In a society with one of the world’s most unequal distributions of wealth the answer is obvious, brutally so. Because you can. – Guardian Unlimited Â