Pat Boran

I learned to swim when I was 38 years of age.

I prefer to put it like that.

I learned to swim when, rather than I didn't learn to swim until.

It's the difference between an achievement and a near four-decade battle with one of the most common elements on earth.

Of the story of how I first came to fear water, the most remarkable thing for me now is how apparently trivial was the incident that led to it.

In June 1971, the first ever public swimming pool in Portlaoise, the first in our part of the Midlands, as it happens, had just opened.

We talked of nothing else.

It was 82 feet by 30 feet, the local newspaper enthused, and on playing pitches such as the one right behind it, and basketball courts throughout the country, kids like myself paced it out, trying to get a sense of it in our minds.

Throughout that summer, the queues were continuous, the noise and excitement and smells extraordinary, even from outside, which was as close as I managed to get.

At that time, no one in our family could swim, except my father, just about, and he was unlikely to brave the chaos of dozens of screaming kids to teach us.

And so the summer months went by.

We set off on our usual two-week holiday, sitting on windswept beaches at Tremor, paddling in the intemperate sea, having long since given up, even at that early age, of learning to trust the water.

Returning to school that September, two days after my seventh birthday, the few of us who hadn't yet paid it a visit had to sit through the endless tales of our classmates who seemed to have done nothing other than swim and sleep over the previous weeks.

Leash is the only county that doesn't even touch a county that touches the sea.

We were reminded again and again by adults who couldn't swim, as if that were excuse enough for their not teaching us.

As it happened, we didn't have to wait for long.

Just a few days back into our old routine, the autumn and shorter evenings starting to move in, one Monday we were all instructed to bring our swimming togs into school the next day when our weekly PE session would take place not in the school hall but in the swimming pool.

Through good fortune and perhaps town planning, the school and pool were almost in sight of one another

both of them built to facilitate the rapid expansion in that part of the town.

So we walked there, downhill most of the way, at first in a neat file as per our orders, out past the bicycle sheds, through the back gate, and down through St Bridget's Place, down through, as it was known, Hungry Hill.