For aesthetic reasons I did not participate in this year’s Sydney Skinny, the all-nude fund-raising harbour swim organised by my friend and award-winning Five of My Life podcaster Nigel Marsh. But I did take part in my first triathlon, and still have the bruises. If you don’t think swimming is a full contact sport, tri an athlon. The swim leg is always first, so that older, fatter participants can have their heart attacks in places where an ambulance can park. But the downside of this is that everybody hits the water en masse, so for the first hundred metres it’s human gridlock. Not a problem if swimmers set off at the same speed, like cars leaving a traffic light. But for some people a triathlon is something to be won, not survived, so they start overtaking immediately, and if they can’t swim around you they just swim over you. And if the people immediately behind them are equally set on getting their name in the Mosman Daily they’ll do the same. Held under in this way for the best part of a minute by a peloton of five or six Ian Thorpe wannabes I panicked, the way people trapped in a burning building panic. And when I finally surfaced, exhaling like a breaching whale, I was so determined to not repeat this experience that I found myself using the same brutal tactic on other swimmers – or at least on the octogenarians and amputees I caught up with. I hope I didn’t kill anyone.

This wasn’t my first experience of water bullies. The pool where I prepared for this event, in North Sydney, has long been a squad training venue, and when I first swam there, as a newly arrived and barely buoyant pom, I failed to notice the signs which divide it according to swimmer speed. As a result I experienced lane rage. This occurs when someone in your lane decides you shouldn’t be there. Usually the angry party waits at the shallow end to tell you, in a voice audible across the postcode, that ‘You’re too slow, mate’. But sometimes he (or she) will assume the attitude of a medieval jouster; powering towards you from the opposite end, drifting to the centre of the lane as you draw level, and clenching his (or her) fist at the moment of impact.

I’ve not suffered the indignity of slow lane demotion for some years, but something happened to me at the same venue very recently which was much more shameful, and could have had life-changing consequences. As I stood poolside one morning wondering which lane to grace, a man who’d followed me out of the changing room muttered something in passing. Wearing earplugs I didn’t catch it, so he said it again, a little louder. Again I didn’t hear, and asked him to repeat it one more time, which he did, with feeling. ‘You’ve split your speedos up the back, mate!’ he roared, ‘Your arse is hanging out!’ Luckily I made it back into the changing rooms before a staff member noticed and called the police, but as I ran, fingers spread across my naked buttocks, I glanced up at the forty or fifty uniformed schoolgirls sitting waiting in the stands, and discerned, through the fog of my goggles, a forest of raised iPhones.

When that pool closes next year for a much-needed makeover, I will use one of the four other pools I can get to in twenty minutes from Kirribilli. Sydneysiders take these facilities for granted. Manhattan has only one 50-metre public pool, and it’s in Harlem so white people won’t go there. The situation in London is not much better. I pined for North Sydney pool during my exile in those cities, and went for a swim there as soon as I moved back. The only thing which had changed in my ten-year absence was in the changing rooms. On the wall was a small sign saying ‘Do not spit in showers’ in English and Cantonese. At the time I saw this as proof of North Sydney Council’s laudable commitment to multiculturalism. Now I’m wondering if it wasn’t actually an early example of what the Left is calling Australia’s growing sinophobia problem.