Thursday 12th August

It seems I am being punished. I knew it would happen – as soon as I wussed out of swimming on Tuesday because I couldn't face the prospect of walking the 15 minute stroll from my house to the Leisure Centre, I knew it would end up raining even worse on today, the day I had promised K I would finally accompany her to the pool. The heavens open around half an hour before the end of the working day and I resign myself to the fact that I'll have to take my umbrella up to Park Road as well as my swimming stuff. So be it – I certainly won't get away with bailing out for a second time in a week.

I have a little time when I get home before I head out, so I tinker around with my new laptop, slightly frustrated that while this is the machine that is supposed to enable me to do more writing, I don't actually have a proper word processing program on it. I'm not used to this – Microsoft Word seems like one of those things that should just be on a computer; it always has been before and it never occurred to me that it might actually cost money. I have a poke around online and find that to actually buy it will set me back some ludicrous number of pounds, but I can't really get by just using WordPad, the glorified version of Notepad that can do fonts, oh yes, but refuses to save files in anything other that .txt or .rtf format. What is this, the 90s? Unbelievable. However, after a little bit more poking around online, I come across OpenOffice – a brilliantly open-source version of the entire Office package that's totally free. Opening up the word processor brings up an interface that is practically identical to MS Word (and I briefly wonder if hardcore Christians refuse to use Word, what with it capitalising Word in the same way they do for the holy “Word” of God). Now I'm set up and have a proper 'thing' to write on – and I have no further excuse not to be banging out thousands of words of prose every single day.

With OpenOffice downloaded and my nerding about done for the evening, I head up to the pool to meet K. The place is busier than it was last Tuesday, when it had been almost perfectly quiet, but not so bad that I can't start doing my lengths in earnest. Like last time, I set myself a target of 30 lengths and keep count of them by counting down from 29 to 0. It's a psychological trick that seems to work – in that when I'm coming to the last few lengths, which should be the hardest, I find myself on a low number and thus more compelled to keep pushing towards the target. I hope this doesn't only make sense to me. What might is that, getting bored with merely counting, I imagine that I am in a race with a field of 30 people, and that I started at the back of the grid. Every length I complete equates to overtaking another person – meaning that by the end of the 30 length stretch I am the winner. Needless to say, I work my way steadily up the field, overtaking with ease before taking first place and even completing a few lengths with clear air ahead of me. I try to ignore the fact that K managed a Herculean 64 lengths – but she's in a different class of race altogether.