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Five minging things about the swimming pool you haven't missed

YOU’RE keen to get back to your public pool, but don’t forget your hazmat suit. There’s still plenty to make you gag:

Plasters

Surfacing and pulling a wet, flaccid plaster out of your hair is synonymous with swimming. It’s impossible to dodge a flesh-coloured piece of Elastoplast encrusted with someone else’s pus and a horrible but inevitable part of every bathing experience, even if you are a member at a fancy gym.

Verrucas

Despite being more of a nuisance than actually physically harmful, catching a verruca is still f**king disgusting. It might explain the middle-class obsession with wild swimming – you might catch Weil’s disease from rat piss but at least you won’t get a stranger’s warts on your feet.

The smell

Public pools are pumped full of chlorine to neutralise the horrible germs and bodily fluids they’re full of after five minutes of use by humans. While this is good at stopping you catching highly infectious skin diseases, it also means you’ll reek like an disused chemical plant for days afterwards.

Communal showers

Showering is a very personal affair to be shared only once with a lover at the beginning of a relationship. The indignity of being chatted to by complete strangers in communal showers whilst clearing your crevices is never pleasant, but marginally preferable to driving home in wet Speedos.

Urine

They might deny it but adults wee in the pool all the time, so don’t think you’re going to avoid a mouthful of warm piss by steering clear of family swim sessions. The only way to not be covered in wee is not to go swimming, so if it really upsets you, consider jogging instead. That way you’ll only have to deal with bleeding nipples.

Mangoes and other foods not worth the f**king effort

COOKING can be fun and relaxing unless you’ve chosen fiddly as f**k ingredients. These five aren’t worth the hassle:

Mangoes

Mangoes are up there with coconuts and pomegranates in giving you scant reward for considerable graft. They’re so slippery to peel you either drop them on the kitchen floor or chop off a fingertip. And what do you get for all that work? A pile of sickly sweet yellow mush.

Avocado

Avocados are incredibly high maintenance. Despite the packaging’s promise that they are ‘ripe and ready to eat’, they’re rock hard so you spend three long, patient weeks gently squeezing them to see if they’re edible yet. And when they finally are, once you’ve removed the skin and the massive stone, there’s barely a scrap of flesh left. Useless.

Lentils

One day you decided to buy a bag of dried lentils to  cheaply make your own delicious dhal. However, when you realised you’d have to soak them overnight before you can even begin cooking, you regretted your foolish mistake, especially as they smell and taste like noxious flatulence. Order a curry from someone who knows what they’re doing instead.

Poached eggs

Who hasn’t had an idyllic, lazy Sunday morning absolutely ruined by these bastards? They seem like a great idea for an aspirational brunch until you end up with either a gelatinous blob of translucent slop or an egg that has somehow become harder than a diamond. Just fry it instead, you ponce.

Lobster

Delicious when you finally get to eat it, but preparing a lobster is like performing a gruesome psychotic murder in miniature. You can either stab it in the brain or boil it alive before performing a clumsy autopsy to retrieve the few tiny morsels of flesh that are edible. You’ll be left both hungry and lastingly disturbed.

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