Definitely Maybe

The Urban Swimmer at the Oasis...

TUS isn't much one for lunchtime exercise. Lunch he feels should be well,..for eating lunch and generally putting ones feet up. However the weather last week was positively spring-like, and the sight of sunglass doffing Londoners filling the West End made TUS long for the pool.

Where better then to visit for a sneaky lunch time swim than The Oasis Sports Centre? Hidden at the wrong end of Shaftesbury Avenue and round the back of Covent Garden and Seven Dials the centre looks pretty inoccuous from the outside. Its entrance is slightly raised from the main thoroughfare, you have probably walked past the place without realising that there was a sports centre there, let alone two whopping pools. Joy of joys is that out the back you will find the above little gem of a pool. An open-air heated pool, in the middle of the city, who would have believed such a thing possible? TUS has been visiting this pool for a good many years, and the truth is that he has probably become a little jaded about it. The place can become horrifically busy during commuter hours: TUS has sometimes had to wait 20 minutes for people to get out of the pool before they let you go in. Plus the staff there are the usual sport centre mix of customer service incompetents. But for all that, TUS still remembers when he first stumbled into the place and discovered the pure pleasure of swimming outdoors in warm water in all weathers. It's a giant bathtub fantasy, and although TUS has never taken his rubber ducky, he feels like it wouldn't be entirely out of place. It's a 27.5m length pool, usually divided into three wide lanes as above and it gets nice and deep about half way down. There is also a 25m indoor pool next to this one, but honestly why would you want to use that except to perhaps escape the busyness of the first pool?

Even though it was March it didn't seem to discourage a few early afternoon sunworshipers who chose to sit on the benches and roof overlooking this suntrap in a post swim haze while drying off a little. An Oasis indeed...well, on a good day.