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It must be terribly difficult being the only one in the village with a pool

Woman floating in swimming pool - Sven Hansche / EyeEm
Woman floating in swimming pool - Sven Hansche / EyeEm

Do you have a swimming pool? I’m not talking about one of those giant adult paddling pools you buy from the garden centre. I mean a proper, dug-down swimming pool that costs roughly £9 million a year to run (and rising) and which you use for three days in July.

I ask because a friend lives in a village where someone has a very smart pool and apparently operates an open-door policy on weeks such as this. Neighbours can drop in to the garden on hot days and make use of the pool as if it were a lido. Children welcome. The more the merrier, is his attitude.

Another friend is horrified by this. Her parents have a swimming pool at their house in the Cotswolds and invite friends over on scorching days, but only for a quick dip. “Mum doesn’t like it when people hang around afterwards on the sunbeds, talking to them and demanding drinks.”

Her father, meanwhile, pulls the cover back on almost as soon as their friends have emerged from the water to signal they can’t go back in again. One dip only, like a Jacob sheep.

How tricky it must be if you are the only one in the village with a pool. On Mumsnet, there’s a very long post, running to nine pages of comments, discussing a drama involving a swimming pool and an aggressive note left under the owner’s windscreen wiper. Do not use your pool after 8pm because of all the splashing and noise, demanded the note, which was signed “Your neighbours”.

Is this reasonable? On the one hand, if you don’t have a pool and you are trying to get your baby to sleep in a hot bedroom during a heatwave, it would be very grating to overhear your neighbours enjoying themselves like warthogs at the watering hole. On the other, the neighbours aren’t going to be out there making a noise in December, so perhaps it’s churlish to deny them the few days of pleasure they get from their expensive toy when they can snatch them. Whatever your view, the solution probably isn’t what one Mumsnet user suggested, which was for pool owners to lay out all their swimming towels so they spell “F--- off” across the garden.

The trouble is, if you ask your neighbours over once, you are setting a precedent. And what if they arrive with inflatables and young children, who will almost certainly wee in your pool? Or there might be a small boy, a Just William type, who has decided to spend his summer perfecting his bombing technique. Last week, while at a hotel in Sicily, I watched a young lad hit the water like a cannonball only to resurface and announce he’d got a nosebleed. He climbed out, gave it a cursory wipe with a paper napkin and immediately got back in, only for his mother to bleat: “Are you still bleeding?” from her sunbed every few minutes.

If that were my pool, I can well imagine the scenario where, to avoid confrontation with said neighbour, I’d have to leave my own garden and go inside, murmuring something about a work call. Hostage in one’s own house.

The Queen doesn’t seem to mind other people using the pool at Buckingham Palace, but I have long suspected that Her Majesty is a more generous and benevolent character than me.

If I had a pool, I suspect I’d be more like Margaret Thatcher, who insisted on keeping the pool at Chequers unheated. “One of her first acts on taking possession of the house was to turn off the heat for the pool on economy grounds,” the archives revealed in 2012. Two benefits to this: first, lower energy bills; second, the neighbours might not dally too long.

Resignation letters hold politeness in the highest regard

Rishi Sunak - OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images
Rishi Sunak - OLI SCARFF/AFP via Getty Images

Did you notice the varying sign-offs used by Conservative MPs in their resignation letters?

“Yours sincerely” was very popular. But some chose differently. Rishi Sunak opted for “kind regards” which made me laugh, given the havoc he surely knew his resignation would unleash.

Some went for “best regards”, as if they were writing to their accountant. Having sent a thundering note in which he declared that “the country deserves better”, John Glen went a step further and wrote “with very best regards”.

“Yours ever”, wrote Felicity Buchan, which also struck me as an odd way to close a letter in which you are announcing that you’re abandoning that person’s government. “Yours never” would be more appropriate, surely?

Shin up: there’s more than hands on the menu in restaurant loos

Toilet sign - Simon McGill
Toilet sign - Simon McGill

It has become fashionable for certain bars and restaurants to leave hand cream in the bathrooms but, as my friend Josh asked on Twitter, has anyone ever used it? I’ve often frowned at the bottles, wondering who has time to stand in a restaurant loo, rubbing cream into their cuticles.

Occasionally, when I have had a glass of wine too many, I’ve accidentally squirted my palm with the cream instead of the soap, but instead of rinsing, I added the soap to the cream and washed with both together. Sometimes now I even do this deliberately because it’s very moisturising. But when I told Josh this on Twitter, he and various others seemed appalled.

Am I a hand-washing deviant? Such behaviour cannot be as poor as that of my friend Holly: she uses restaurant hand cream on her shins if she thinks they need attention.