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Waterworld

A day of new discoveries in York. Waterworld is more than a swimming pool. It’s a swimming pool with a wave machine, lots of slides, McCains microchips and a muddy swamp that doubles as a car park. It also has a queue that snakes several hundred metres out of its doors. But then, it is half term. Is it the norm now to have unisex changing areas in leisure centres? I so rarely do ‘leisure’ that I’m not sure. But it felt all wrong. Mainly because I was fully clothed and only in there to help Danielle, Scott and Sam out with the complexities of the lockers.

York City Knights (surely on of the daftest names in rugby league?) play round the back of Waterworld. Not a sign of Kevin Costner anywhere on set during our five hour visit.

I read a hefty chunk of Murakami’s Wind Up Bird Chronicle in the noisy, echoing surroundings. A woman to my right was reading George Orwell’s Down and Out… I couldn’t fail to notice because the words ‘George Orwell’ totally filled the cover, and she seemed to be reading in a rather peculiar ‘look at me, I’ve moved beyond Animal Farm and am studying for an English Lit A Level now the kids have grown up’ manner. There were lots of other readers in too. We could have formed a reading group if only one of us had been brave enough to instigate it. Although I’m not sure I would have invited the woman sat at a table to my left along. She was stuck into a Kate Adie biography and had ‘Can I just bore you with the bit I love where a camouflaged Kate is filming while gunshot flies right through one ear and out the other one and she doesn’t even blink – but then she is a consumate professional’ right on the tip of her tongue. I wonder what they made of me. ‘Japanese populist nonsensical shit’ no doubt.Some child in the queue kepy banging its holdall into my leg while we waited to get in. I wanted to tell it to fuck off. Its parent was talking to another parent for 30 minutes about how they hated being in a queue for 30 minutes. And the holdall assualter kept muttering that they wanted to go home. Go on then!

GTP phoned while we were in the queue. Did we enjoy the rehearsals? He sounded nervous as he awaited the response. I guess he’s going through a moment of insecurity as the first night gets closer, which is something I didn’t even consider that directors suffered from. An interesting revelation.

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