I’m a member of my local library’s book club and over the last few months or so, I haven’t enjoyed the books that were chosen for us.

However, I guess that’s why we have book clubs. We don’t always need to love the book we read. Instead, if it inspires thought provoking conversation or changes our perception to situations we might otherwise not have come across then I guess that’s a good thing.

This month’s book I would say, is one of the best books I’ve read in their collection for 2024.

It’s about a young woman who is recovering from a chronic illness and how she meets two other young women with the same pain. It’s a meditation on pain and how she manages pain through her two relationships with these women Frieda and Sylvia who have different approaches to their pain management too. In the process, the unnamed protagonist loses her identity trying to find herself in how to live with chronic illness.

I loved the writing and it reminded me of the writing of Charlotte Wood. Also one of the biggest impact is questioning my own action of why, after Covid, I too, had stopped going to the swimming pool which I loved.

Last Saturday afternoon, I happened to be in Carlton wandering around Rathdowne Street and I stumbled upon the local baths. It was where I learned how to swim in 1978 and it intrigued me to see how much of it had changed. In my younger years, I swam there, at the Brunswick Baths, Fitzroy, Moonee Ponds as well. It brought back memories and thankfully, the staff allowed me to head through and see the pool.

Obviously nowadays the pool is modernised. I remember the slippery tiles around the edges and the tall tiled steps we’d dive from when at the start of our lap races. Back then they seemed too tall and I was scared of hitting the water with a belly whack.

There were more pools. Harold Holt in Malvern, Carnegie Pool, St Kilda City Baths, City Baths….swimming pools are everywhere here in Melbourne and the suburbs yet I’ve seemed to stop going.

Maybe it’s time to visit all of them again. One by one, head out to each of them and experience them as a trip down memory lane?