Pat Boran

a handsome, good-humoured, sallow-skinned youth.

The opposite of me, muscular, robust and athletic, he might have posed for a Renaissance statue and stood in the square of a sun-drenched Italian town.

And given his enthusiasm for the task ahead and his reputed prowess in the water, I felt somewhat reassured to be positioned at his side.

However,

No sooner had I tiptoed carefully to the water's edge to gaze down a moment, gazelle-like, into the ripples before me, trying to estimate the distance from surface to tiled depths below, than young Adonis himself, whom I had always liked and liked even afterwards, with the slightest of efforts, the most casual of gestures—

tipped me off balance and into and I see it again and still as if it was just now this morning.

The glistening blue-green depths of that pool in a slow-motion falling action which, ironically, rather than drowning me, would have me on dry land for the next 31 years.