The Flexi Beret: The Day We Dipped

When packing to go on a holiday Rule No. 1 is you're only allowed to pack those items you will wear. We had many will we / won't we discussions about whether to throw in our bathers. We would have a pool in Provence, but would it be hot enough to go for a dip? The jury voted...the bathers were coming to France.

After returning from lunch on Day 3 in Provence, Aggie made the big announcement..."I'm putting the bathers on & going for a dip". Ballsy move as I'd felt the temperature of the water that morning & it wasn't exactly warm. One in all in though, so we headed to our rooms to cossie up & met at the edge of the pool, wrapped in our beach towels & giggling like 4 year olds who'd had too much red cordial.

Aggie was first in...well her toes anyway. I thought OK if Aggie can do it, it mustn't be too cold. Couldn't have been more wrong. I think my right toe went into shutdown when I dipped....holy mother of god it was cold. This wasn't looking good as technically we had to actually get our bathers wet, not just wear them, to be able to tick them off the list. Starting to sense an epic fail coming on we pushed through the pain barrier & surged ahead (Thorpie would have been proud). When I say surge it did take about 7 mins to actually lower our heels into the water. Sounds pathetic & we were. I won't bother to say how much longer it took to get our knees wet as it's just embarrassing.

Hmmm what to do? Maybe if we just kicked our legs while holding ourselves up on our elbows on the side of the pool it would start to warm us up. Brilliant, until we got a little fatigued & ended up face down on the concrete...we still kept kicking our legs though as we needed the exercise to work off our 3 course lunch. To anyone who was unfortunate to be walking by at that particular time & caught a glimpse of us, it would have looked like we weren't the full can of Coke & that our carers had wandered off & abandoned us to go have a ciggie. Flailing around like two beached whales, or maybe more like two beached flatheads as one side of our face was totally squashed into the concrete, was not a pretty sight but we wouldn't give up.

I'm sure I saw out of my one good eye (my other one was well & truly closed so as not to get dirt in it being squashed into the concrete & all) two Japanese tourists peer over the fence, shake their heads & walk away. Doesn't do much for a girl's ego when a Japanese tourist doesn't take a pic. Hurtful.

Through much yelping, which we tried to do in an American accent as we're Aussies & couldn't bear the shame, we finally got the courage to lower our bodies to get all of our bathers wet (I suspect by this stage we'd actually lost all feeling & possibly just slipped in, with the lowering of the torso being unintentional but pffft). May have only been for 30 secs but mission accomplished...we'd nailed it.

Brrr time to get out of the pool & lay on the sunbed to defrost & debrief about how fabulous we were (it's amazing how much brighter things look when you get blood flowing to your brain again). In our minds it was an afternoon of splashing about, lazing on the sunbeds sipping our wine, then back in for some more laps. Talk about a full on day.