We are reaching the business end of the swimming year. Galas coming along like your banana bus route, none for ages and a bunch arrive together!

The time invested by parents, coaches and most importantly the children comes together at Gala weekend. The children have a great time, pre-race heeby jeebies, post race injuries and the odd disappointment apart.

But for the parents, whilst we love watching our children achieve, it can be a long weekend.

We are used to getting out of bed early to get the bag ready: the energy bars, the sports drinks, the pastilles,Oh …and the swimmers food as well!

We turn up full of anticipation, but we know there is an hour and a half warm up. We buy the programme and scroll down and down and down and down, our swimmer is not in till event 12 ! , only four hours time!

Now I have sat through Ireland Egypt in Italia 90, Arsenal Aston Villa in the autumn of George Graham the last day of a Cricket test match that is destined for a draw. So I am not a” two minute warning” sporting person.

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Inspiring story from renowned Australian journalist, John Pilger…

“…Most days, growing up, I would walk down a steep hill past blocks of Aussie Gothic with stairwells that stank of cabbage and beer and dogs, through crooked alleyways of fresh tar turned to putty in the heat and rusted iron fences, beyond which were “Bondi semis”, faithful copies of the back-to-backs of northern England.

The comparison stopped there. Nowhere else was the reflected light so bright it hurt, leaving the eyes with a permanent squint. Nowhere else was the air laced with such an intoxicating smell, which came with the salt spray of the South Pacific, the greatest ocean on earth.

I am an inveterate swimmer. I learned to swim when I was very young. In flaming sunrises or hard rain, Reg Clark, a courtly, few-words Iceberger (an Iceberger swam in all seasons) taught me to swim through the white water of 30-foot waves as they broke over Bondi’s ocean baths. “Reach out, reach out,” he would say, as he paced me along the barnacled wall, impervious to each great fist of water. The stroke was freestyle, or crawl as it is known in England; breaststroke was considered, well, sissy. And when Reg said I was ready to race, he arranged for a number to be pinned on me and for the ocean to calm down.

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