The Man Who Swept the Empty Lido

The lido on Harbour Road closes on the first of October. The water is let out, the gate is chained, and the pale blue tiles lie open to the sky all winter, collecting leaves, gull feathers and the occasional lost football. And every morning at half past seven, from October until the pool fills again in May, Dennis Okafor lets himself in with a key nobody remembers giving him and sweeps it.

He is seventy-eight. He swam there every summer morning for forty years, twenty lengths before work and then, after he retired, twenty lengths before breakfast. When the pool closed for the first winter of his retirement, he found he did not know what to do with half past seven. So he took a broom down to Harbour Road, climbed down the steps into the deep end, and started on the leaves.

Nobody asked him to, and for the first few years nobody quite noticed. Then the manager found a neat pile of leaves by the gate one January and a thermos flask on the diving board, and stayed late enough one morning to see who was responsible. She did not say anything. The next week there was a second broom leaning against the changing rooms, newer than his, with a ribbon tied round the handle.

Over the winters the sweeping acquired an audience. Dog walkers began stopping at the railings to watch. A girl on her way to school started shouting down the number of days left until the pool opened, and Dennis started shouting back the temperature of the air, which was always worse. One February a man in a suit climbed over the gate, took off his jacket, and swept the shallow end without a word before hurrying off to his train.

Now there is a rota, though nobody wrote it down. Tuesdays belong to the girl, who is at secondary school now and brings a friend. Thursdays belong to the man in the suit. Dennis still takes every other morning, and on the day the water goes back in he is first in the queue, first down the steps, and first to complain that it is freezing, which it is.

The pool does not need sweeping in January. Nobody pretends it does. What the sweepers are really doing is keeping a summer in good order before it arrives, and there is something true in that. Psychologists who study happiness have found that looking forward to a good thing is a pleasure in its own right. One study of Dutch holidaymakers found they were happier in the weeks before their trip than people who were not going away at all.

The small rituals help too. A regular time, a task with a clear finish and a familiar place give a winter morning a shape, which is often what people miss most when a routine they loved comes to an end. So if you find yourself cleaning the barbecue in March, or oiling a bicycle in the rain, you are not being strange. You are sweeping your own lido.