Hail To Thee Backstroker!

Last year I read a book called The Swimmer As Hero and since finishing it, I've tootled along, three days a week, to swim at the charming St Kilda Sea Baths just down the road from my house. The building is attractive, the staff helpful, the water buoyant. The number of hairy, obese Russian men is higher than I would have thought strictly necessary but the Russian guys are mostly there to argue with one another in the hot tub so they dont really bother me. I generally swim in the slow lane because you never see those nutters who do the turny flips and you seldom feel the pressure of people behind you (one of the reasons I gave up golf).
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It's lovely and except when St Kilda FC comes by to show off their impressive physiques my only menace is the backstroker. Ah, the backstroker - I am fascinated by these bold adventurers who choose that odd method of locomotion in a small community pool. When I'm doing the crawl or the breastroke I'm very careful about keeping to the left hand side of the lane lest I touch someone or disturb anyone with my arm motion. Backstrokers however are a different breed. Like Polynesian canoeists they launch themselves into the unknown without map or compass, caring naught for anything but their own progression down the 25 metres of the pool. I couldn't go 2 metres without worrying that I was about to bump into something or that my leg kick was splashing in some poor devil's face. The rugged individuals of the backstroke fraternity (actually mostly sorority) have however obviously read and digested their Ayn Rand. Ayn didn't show mercy and neither do her acolytes. Regardless of your lane they will kick you, slap you, sideswipe you, kick you again - sometimes it's like an aquatic Three Stooges out there. While everyone else is looking forward at their fellow man, buying into the notion that Friedrich Hayek was wrong and that there is such a thing as a society, the backstroker is off in her own realm, staring at the ceiling and only vaguely aware that other human beings are in the pool or indeed that they exist at all. This impresses me no end. We need backstrokers in our civilization: we need them up on Mars erecting geodesic domes or digging wells in Africa or exploring jungles looking for new medicines.
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We certainly need them in the St Kilda Sea Baths to show us how to live. This afternoon when I was at the end of a lap, a large man with a magnificent swathe of back hair was trying to climb up the ladder thus blocking the lane to my immediate left; coming towards me in a gold swim hat was a backstroker. She couldn't see me of course so I was trapped between a rock and a hard place. Or more accurately between a hairy, wet buffalo-like hide of back hair and an Ayn Rand torpedo. Naturally I got the worst of all possible worlds. She crashed into me and the hairy guy and he fell backwards onto both of us. Flustered I got out and huffed for a second and moved to the Medium Lane. She, what did she do? She just grunted, turned around and carried on backstroking as if nothing had happened.
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Would you be upset? Not, I. I for one salute these brave backstroker types who grunt and move on. They are out there every day landing on Plymouth Rock, making the desert bloom, humiliating subordinates in boardrooms etc. and if it wasn't for their aggressive torpedo practice in the local swimming pool Plymouth Rock would probably stay completely unlanded upon and the desert would remain that dull yellow colour. Anyway that's what I think about all of this, her grunt in lieu of an apology bespeaks her take on the matter and history, alas, does not record what the hirsute Russian gentleman had to say.