The Truth About Paddling

“You took her paddling?” was her shrill response as if I’d just informed her I’d locked our mutual friend and colleague in a basement room and had been abusing her physically for the past week.

“Aye, paddling, just like we did”

I knew immediately that this was the wrong line of defence completely by the thunderously hurt look on her coupon.

Since when was paddling such a controversial pastime? Baring ones feet to the watery substances, socks off, trousers rolled up seems the most innocent pursuit imaginable and yet….somehow this Glenda one here seemed to be perceiving it as the most treacherous betrayal.

Surely she knew that Linda came to see him too and it was all strictly ‘above board’? The three of them worked together after all and seemed to get on swimmingly if you’ll excuse the pun! One week Glenda, the next Linda: all summer this pattern had seemed to emerge almost organically, although they never now congregated as a threesome as they used to at the start. Other colleagues made little jokes and innuendos about this ‘threesome’ but I just shrugged them off. Truth was that I never thought of either of them in such a light, they were just mates who happened to be female and it never even occurred to me that they were anything else.

But now this paddling furore!

Why was it men and women could not be just mates? It wasn’t as if I was some sort of Richard Gere (or even Mardy Pillow from Wet Wet Wet). I wasn’t irresistible to women in any sense that I was aware of. I’d spent the best part of sixty years having this proved to me on a daily basis. I was at that stage where young females felt able to talk to me at bus stops so little of a credible predatory threat did I appear to them.

But apparently, when performing the act of paddling I was Depp, Bloom and Clooney all rolled into one. I only had to sensuously remove my socks and the female of the species were drooling at the mouth (and not just due to old age and/or infirmity). I must have appeared an Adonis while casually splashing among the low waves.

“And did you enjoy your paddle with Linda?”

She said this last as if she envisioned the two of us rolling in the sand like Lancaster and Kerr in From Here to Eternity, the waves thrusting suggestively and the rest of the beach-combers applauding encouragement.

It all of a sudden came back to me what my auld Da had told me o so many years ago and I hadn’t been listening.

“See women and paddling, son. It does something to their feet that sends them bonkers. If you paddle with one, don’t paddle with the other. It could cost you your life!”

Wise words, as it turns out!