Summer Fun

The last Monday before the summer holidays. 90 degrees in the shade and I’m awfully glad I brought my straw hat. Funny enough my students don’t laugh when I put it on in the sweltering heat. They even look a bit envious. Good. I’m envious of their perfect bodies, their perfect tans, their perfect teeth and the fact that they are allowed to show so much naked flesh nowadays without feeling at all uncomfortable. Even if I had a perfect body I would never feel at ease like that.

My parents, especially my mother, came from a strictly religious background, and when I was young even wearing trousers wasn’t really done; at least not when you had to go to school, although it was something else when we went on holiday to the seaside. There we were allowed to wear shorts or even bathing suits.

Oh, that very first bathing suit! I remember it was red with a little white sailing boat stitched on the front. My mother had knitted it herself. Just think of it, a knitted woolen bathing suit. Of course it was a perfect fit until you went into the water, because then it began to sag. When you came out of the sea the thing was so saturated with water that the bottom immediately dropped down to the back of your knees and the whole thing filled with water as well so that you looked like an over-sized red bumble bee. With a super large bottom like that the shoulder straps became twice as long and the top dropped down to your waist. I know, I was three or four, so that didn’t really matter, but it must have been a funny sight.

Fortunately my dad never took a picture of that, because pictures at that time always had to be perfect. Film was expensive and prints too, so every picture had to be posed for and me and my sister had to stand for hours in the same position until my dad had got the lighting right. This usually made me look stiff and stilted, while sis often looked fuzzy, because she didn’t like to stand still for a long time.

When I got older, I got my first real bathing suit. Dark blue with white seagulls. I remember it very well, because I was so happy with it. It was made of some new-fangled spandex, nylon with a bit of elastic woven through and, oh great miracle, your bottom now remained perfectly covered. I never became a big fan of swimming, mainly because the water was rather wet and I didn’t like sand getting everywhere, but swimming costumes were never the problem anymore.

Although, there was my first bikini. Orange that one was. It wouldn’t have been all that bad, if the inside of the bra hadn’t been made of some kind of plastic that became hard as a rock when it got cold and wet in the water. Now that was really uncomfortable, beside the fact that bikinis were never my cup of tea. The material it was made of was not like it is nowadays and the thing still lost much of its shape in the water, so it was very easy to lose the bikini bottom while swimming, or finding your bra covering your ears like great big orange earmuffs when you jumped into the water.

No, I never developed a great fondness for swimming and now that I’m over the hill and will probably never be able to see my feet again, I know I will not possess a bathing suit ever again. I do like to be beside the seaside now and again, properly covered up however, preferably in a sort of tent of ginormous proportions, a big hat and loads of suntan oil factor 2000.