I've spent the better half of my few working days the past three weeks organising a 2 hour swimming session.

That makes it a very expensive swimming session, even before you consider cost of a creche, a life guard, the venue hire, the support staff on the day and the input of my colleagues in the saga.

Why does it take so much effort?
Firstly, you need to coordinate the creche, 2 life guards (in case one drowns you need a second life guard), availability of pool, while avoiding other events in the area that might clash. To make it really tricky, most mobile creches don't do Saturdays, and most lifeguards are male, and looking for two female lifeguards for a weekend session is clearly asking for trouble.

The lifeguard issue is particularly daunting. For muslim women, it wouldn't be acceptable to have male life guard, which is partly the reason why we organise the swimming session. Local swimming pools can't even guarantee female lifeguards for women only sessions, and most pools nowadays are open to the street rather than enclosed which also doesn't exactly include muslim women. But how do you source female lifeguards? Glasgow is a big city, yet shockingly lacking in that department. I phoned every conceivable pool and finally got lucky in the neighbouring local authority, while the equalities and inclusion officer of Culture and Sport organised the second lifeguard. We literally had to pull all strings, talk our ears hot (?) on the phone and be a right pain in the bum to finally get there. 

I'm absolutely drained but have to admit with a certain amount of satisfaction hailing from the realm of defiance that on 7th June, 2-4pm, there will be a female only swimming session at a south side pool for asylum seeking and refugee mums with children under 5. All we now need to do is get the punters. That shouldn't be too hard, last time around we had an overwhelming response.

Unless something else goes wrong.

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And something did. In fact, two things went wrong. It's unbelievable really - Just a few days to the swimming session (remember, we're talking a one off 2 hours swimming session) the letting people advise me that the school undertakes a "backwash" every Saturday afternoon. Like, we enquired about availability for various Saturdays and never was this mentioned? Like, we asked the janitor as well to make sure there weren't any surprises?

All my pleading in vain. Either we look into another school or no let. Now, let's recap, we're planning to take asylum seeking mums of pre 5 children (who often may have older children too- I mean the mums, not the pre 5s of course) swimming. They don't have cars, no spare cash and can't afford transport. Nevermind that one bus can only ever take one pram, and buses only go every 30 mins on a Saturday. Which means that we'd have to stagger bus transport starting at 6 a.m.. Realistically, if we were to use another pool we'd have to taxi them there and back. Which kind of adds another £100 or so to the equation. When the second lifeguard decided to join the cancellation spree, I'd finally had enough.

Say it out loud and repeat after me:
I SHALL NEVER EVER TRY TO ORGANISE A SWIMMING SESSION AGAIN.

Culture and Sport, subdivision community lets, you're so fired.