I DO not know who invented the changing facilities in swimming baths but I hope he is sitting in a little cubicle in Hell, next to the people who let their dogs defecate in parks and the people who design the treads of trainers.

It is not actually the changing cubicles to which I object. Yes, they are too small for a man in his early forties who cannot remove a pair of trousers without tipping over and kissing the partition, but I accept that people of that sort are not the norm.

It is more the humiliating arrangement which places the clothing of the swimmer too far away from the cubicle.

For semi-nudity is a strange and mysterious thing. It is acceptable – even desirable – in a swimming pool, unless one is wearing pyjamas and retrieving a rubber brick. It is not acceptable in Tesco. (Incidentally, neither is wearing pyjamas, and the line there needs to be re-drawn.)

But in the gap between changing cubicle and swimming pool, semi-nudity falls into the category of “understandable, but difficult.” I am uncomfortable enough showering on my own. It is even worse in the midst of a group of strangers, all trying to work out where they can legitimately lather without ending up on some sort of register.

And standing by lockers is just as bad. Nobody looks good wet and shivering. You will note that when Daniel Craig steps out of the sea as James Bond, it is in Caribbean or Mediterranean waters, not New Brighton. That wet, shivery look is even worse combined with the myopic squint of somebody searching for the correct locker while carrying a rubber ring.

I never swim alone. It is always a family “treat.” For reasons with which I will not bore you, we need two cubicles and a family locker.

It is not so bad when one is changing for the pool, because one can secure two adjoining cubicles, before finding a locker close by.

But when one returns to the changing facilities, the only available cubicles are rarely situated close to one’s locker. You might be surprised to hear that I recently came to grief as a result of this.

It was while I was on holiday at a maximum-security forest facility. I won’t name it, but if you can imagine a sort of Boden Butlin’s, you won’t go far wrong. My family found a couple of cubicles in a different postcode to the locker, and I began the first of three journeys to retrieve the contents.

The key fitted and I pulled open the door. Then I went to find the pound coin which had flown out of the lock. I stood up, and took the first pile of clothes back to the cubicles, leaving the door open for easy reference.

I returned for the second pile of clothes, and a man appeared next to me. He was shaped like a Buddha statue, with hairy shoulders, and a pair of Speedos.

I realised that he was trying to gain access to the locker below mine, so I closed the door over and walked back to the cubicle again, reasoning that a cross between Tom Daley and Danny DeVito would make a useful landmark.

He was still at his locker when I returned for the final time. But I could not open the door as he was in the way. Patiently, I stood there, and was joined by a youngish woman of Carry On film proportions, wearing a bikini. I grimaced awkwardly, and waited for the dawdling hairball to just bloody hurry up. Finally he scuttled off, and I yanked my door open.

It wasn’t my locker. I knew that because I don’t own a handbag. I knew where this was going.

“Can you get out of my locker, please?” said the Carry On woman, with the cross face of a woman watching a strange man fiddling with her personal effects. Presumably, Daley DeVito had picked the wrong locker initially, and rectified his error while I was slipping away with the second pile of clothes.

And I hope, as the flames of Hades lick at the feet of the man who invented swimming pool changing facilities, and the sound of two Janet Street-Porters singing Delibes’ Flower Duet ravages his ears, he will spend eternity thinking about what he did to me.

1850 HOURS: the wind whipped across the platform, prickles of rain stinging the grey faces of the commuters. This was autumn.

Not good autumn, with its crunchy leaves, mugs of soup, and the smell of a distant bonfire, but the dismal autumn of slimy pavements, and the sense of a tunnel’s gradual approach.

But where the man in the black cable-knit jumper came from, this evening would have been considered mild, an Indian summer, before the hard-packed Siberian winter.

He took a mobile phone from his pocket and stared at the picture on his screen – a man in his forties with glasses and a disappointed face. This man was the target? This man looked as if he would get mildly annoyed about cheese toasties cut on the diagonal.

And yet hadn’t he, just minutes before, managed to cause a diversion in a Nando’s restaurant? Leaning on an unstable table, then crashing to the floor, and losing his tail during the consternation… he may well be a twisted genius.

The phone buzzed in his hand. If he was startled by it, he did not let it show. “Sergei,” he said, in Russian. “The target is here. He’s running for a train for Crewe.”

“Shadow him,” said Control, also in Russian. They were both Russians. It made sense.

Sergei slipped into the target’s carriage and sat across the aisle and behind him, observing him for 20 minutes as he attempted to dispose of an empty apple juice bottle discreetly. The target gave up and settled in his seat. And Sergei did the same, staring at the rivulets of rain on the window, his thoughts drifting back to St Petersburg, and Natalia. Drifting . . .

The train halted. The target was already heading out of the doors. Sergei snapped into action, dragging his shoulder bag behind him.

He watched the target sprinting along the platform, heading towards another stationary train. He knew! How? Then he saw the target slow down, shake his head, and shuffle off.

Sergei reached the train. Its destination sign read “Liverpool,” but it was parked by the buffers. Surely he hadn’t thought this was his actual train! What, did he think it was a magic train? This was an idiot.

Or was he? The target was disappearing into a cafe. Sergei followed, watching his quarry get a bar of Dairy Milk from a vending machine.

“Argh!” said the target, as he pulled his hand out, scratching it on the metal slot cover. “A QUID too! It’s 65p in work!” the target grumbled, as he bustled past Sergei. Sergei followed the target to the departures board. He twitched. Sergei looked at the screen. The Liverpool trains were cancelled.

So why was the target waiting for a Chester train instead of going to Manchester and hopping across? He must know he had a tail.

Either that, or he was a total plantpot. He could see now why he had been given this job, as the only man in the KGB with an encyclopaedic knowledge of northern England train timetables.

Another twitch. Was that a little tear? Sergei looked at the board again. All Chester trains were now cancelled.

2050 hours: The train to Holyhead arrived. The target boarded it, followed by Sergei. This train was going to Chester. That made sense. Then an announcement on board. “We apologise, but this train is being diverted to Warrington before it arrives in Chester because of flooding on the line.” Another tear in the target’s eye. None of this added up.

2200 hours: the target staggered from the train into the Chester departures court. He looked up at the board and let out a cry that sounded like true anguish to Sergei. The Russian read it too. All Liverpool trains were cancelled.

For the first time in his career, Sergei, the iceman assassin, had a pang of human feeling towards a target. This poor man just wanted to get home. And over the next couple of hours he stayed with him, boarding two buses and another bloody train, and then tailing his taxi from Liverpool city centre.

0015 hours: the target exited his taxi and walked up his path. There was a sickening crunch. He had trodden on a snail. He whimpered.

Sergei dialled. “Control,” he said, in Russian. “I can’t do it. This man, Bainbridge, has suffered enough.”

“Who’s Bainbridge?” said Control, in Russian. “You massive divvy. You’re supposed to kill Michael Gove.”

MONDAY was one of those days. It started off badly, rolled down a hill, stopped by the side of a bottomless ravine, stood up and said, “Phew,” then was hit on the back of the head by a plank carried by a passing short-sighted handyman and tumbled headlong into the black crevice.

It began at Lime Street station. I arrived just in time to grab a drink and catch my train to Birmingham. You don’t need to know why I was heading back to the Home of the Square Burger, just accept that I had to be there.

I dashed into WH Smith, got the first drink I could see, and, well, I won’t go into detail but they had installed an automated express checkout and it went very badly and I arrived at the platform to see my train gently drifting away.

I did get to Birmingham eventually, but then was unable to do most of the work I was meant to do in Birmingham because I had apparently displeased S’tevjobs, the Aztec god of IT, presumably by not doing a back-up, or taking a memory stick out of my laptop without “dismounting.”

A taxi driver dropped me at Birmingham New Street station and I was so ready to go home that I was hallucinating my shoes were slippers. I sighed, quite heavily, when I saw on the board that my train had been cancelled. In retrospect, I had peaked too early with regard to sighing. My day was going to get much worse.

I decided to get some food and wandered the streets and malls of Birmingham searching for a meal, in the end finding a Nando’s. I need to say here that I quite like Nando’s, as I enjoy eating food so spicy that I feel as if I have received a punch in the mouth and then had my lips stapled.

A waitress greeted me at the door and showed me to my seat. She asked me if I had been to a Nando’s before and I answered in the affirmative. I felt a little bit like James Bond walking into a casino, totally at ease with his surroundings.

I walked over to the ordering area and noted a group of four men loitering. I was about to ask one of the men if he was in the queue, and got as far as “Excuse me, mate…” when the waitress told me to stand further away, on the other side of the men. “Typical,” I thought. “I have two choices of ends and I pick the wrong one.”

A till became free and I looked along the line. The man at the head of the queue did not move. He looked at me. Oh, I thought. These men are waiting for a takeaway. I am next in line. I stepped forward. “Can I have…?”

A waiter also stepped forward. “Excuse me, sir, this man is next.” He pointed to the man I had been standing next to. “You need to stand there.” He pointed to the end of the queue I had originally chosen. The four men glared at me as I took up my position.

Thankfully, I already looked awkward as I was a 40-year-old man dining alone in Nando’s, so nobody noticed my extra discomfort.

I ordered my meal, picked up more napkins than one would think necessary and filled up my glass with Coke at the dispenser. I liked that bit, even though I am a 40-year-old man, and sat down at my table. I adjusted myself and put my foot inadvertently on the table’s pedestal. It turned out it was a very wobbly table.

I mopped up the Coke with the extra napkins and gratefully received my food. While it was perfectly pleasant, it became quickly apparent that chicken on the bone is not something that solo diners can eat un-selfconsciously. I was seated between two pairs of women and occasionally they would glance at me, appalled.

It was extremely spicy chicken and I had spilled half my drink anyway, so I decided to get a refill. Then I was distracted – one of the women was talking about a baby shower, and I was thinking about how dangerous that sounded – and I leant on the table edge in order to stand up.

And that is how I ended up sitting on the floor in a Birmingham Nando’s. I decided not to bother with the refill and left for the station, where I caught my train.

And that is the point at which, staring down at the ravine, I said, “Phew!”

To be continued…

IT HAS occurred to me that I have no conception of the measurement of distance or weight or liquid capacity.

This is not my fault, I think that many people of my approximate age suffer from the same inadequacy.

For I was born at the time of decimalisation and the introduction of the metric system. And so when I went to school, I was taught about metres and kilograms and litres. But when I went home, or out into the wider world, if I mentioned such exotic measurements to adults, their eyes would dull with incomprehension, as if I were speaking white noise.

“What’s that you say, Gary?” they would ask. “Little Timmy’s been trapped down the well?”

“No,” I would say. “I said I wanted 250 grams of kola kubes, please.”

“Quick, to the well!” they would say. “Fetch the rope, Mabel. The damn fool’s got an elephant down there.”

I had to become used to working with two systems, but a man cannot follow two gods properly. So for small distances I use centimetres, for long distances I use miles. For liquids I use litres, unless the liquid in question is diesel, when I use gallons.

I still have no idea if it’s 14 ounces in a pound and 16 pounds in a stone, or the other way round. And I have no real sense of how long a yard is, which is partly why I am so dreadful at giving or following directions. If you ask me how far away something is, I am like one of those tribesmen who only have terms for one or more than one. “Far,” I will say, or “Not far. I cannot give you more detail and it is unfair of you to ask me.”

Governments of both colours basically wrote off my school year. I think they could see that they had ruined us and that is why the Conservatives decided to bring in the GCSE exam in the year we would be due to take our O Levels.

“It is all right, Margaret,” Education Secretary Kenneth Baker would have said, “This generation is useless. We have ensured they will have no jobs anyway, and I understand very few of them even know the difference between imperial and metric tonnes. I believe there’s even a boy in Liverpool who doesn’t know for sure how many inches there are in a foot. We can experiment on this lot with no consequences at all.”

And the Prime Minister would have said: “Excellent. Chuck another miner on the fire, Tebbit. I cannot privatise everything if my hands are cold.”

I did not like GCSEs. I was essentially lazy and easily distracted for four years of my life – the worst four years I could have chosen – and O Levels would have suited me as I would have been able to cram a load of revision in at the end of fifth year and do quite well.

But GCSEs introduced coursework as an important element of the the final mark, and I was done for. Combine this with the fact that my teachers were dealing with an entirely new structure AND I had chicken pox during the exam period, and, well, I didn’t exactly distinguish myself. I got two Bs, six Cs, two Ds and two Es. Or eight A*s and four As in today’s money.

Maybe I should be pleased, or perhaps jealous, that the current Education Secretary, Michael Gove, is abolishing the GCSE and a lot of annoying coursework, in the name of halting that grade escalation.

However, I am not an educationalist. I cannot offer any sort of opinion on whether his English Baccalaureate will improve education in this country. I am so ignorant of the issues that I could easily slot into any focus group.

But what I do know is that the first year to take the new exams will suffer, because they are being experimented upon. The exam system will bed in, and there will be some tinkering around the margins, but that will be of small consolation to those who had to take the exams first.

I understand how heavily that can weigh on that first year. Although, obviously, I have no idea how to quantify that weight.

STRANGERS keep asking me for my telephone number and it is disturbing me.

I do not wish you to think this is one of those “It Is Dreadful Being As Gorgeous As What I Am” articles that they have in the Daily As Bad As The Sun And We Even Employ Kelvin Mackenzie But We Apparently Get Away With It Because We Use Serif Headlines.

That sort of thing does not happen to me, a truth to which a brief glance at my byline picture would testify. I am not constantly being assailed by women in the street desperate for a piece of speccy four-eyed awkward action – or, indeed, by men in these times of sexual fluidity.

If anything, sexual liberalisation has merely increased the range and number of people who find themselves consciously unattracted to me.

Nevertheless, I keep being asked for my number by people, for reasons beyond me. Google is a good case in point. I use Google’s Gmail service. It is sort of all right, and I haven’t got any complaints about it. It allows me to receive emails, and to send them, and that is all I require of an email service. I am not Sir David Frost or Rihanna.

But increasingly, as I log in to my emails, I am halted by a screen which warns me of imminent doom. “Imagine if you forgot your email password,” it suggests, in the voice of Ray Winstone. “You wouldn’t like that, would you? That’d be proper naughty.”

Then it plays Good Cop. It hands me a cup of tea in a polystyrene cup and says, “Why don’t you give me your mobile number, sonny? That way, if you forget your password, we can text you, can’t we?”

For a moment, I think that’s a good idea. My password is exactly the sort of thing I’d forget.

And then I remember that Google knows virtually everything about me and the last thing I want to do is give it the ability to text me at any time. I might as well give Facebook my number.

And then I remember that every so often Facebook asks for my mobile number, too, in a sort of Californian, “No biggy. Y’know it’s cool if you don’t want to. It’s just…well, all your friends have given theirs, and, y’know, maybe you’re not getting the best out of Facebook if we don’t know enough about you to blackmail you.”

I recently decided enough was enough with the incredible slowness of my broadband supply, and started to shop around. I had a look at Talk Talk’s site, which suggested I type in my postcode and landline number so it could test my line and see what sort of speed I might get in the event nobody else in a 10-mile radius was using the internet. I was unimpressed and chose a different supplier.

A couple of days later, I got a phone call from Talk Talk, “just following up your query.” The devious swines had managed to winkle my ex-directory landline number out of my grasping hands and were using it against me.

I do not know if you remember libraries – they are what people had before they had Kindles – but I was visiting one on behalf of my children, and thought it was about time I had a library card of my own. I am not a philistine, I used to have library tickets, but the library lost two of them, and when they brought in the card system they refused to give me a card because I didn’t have all of my tickets.

Anyway, I assumed I would be all right under the statute of limitations and filled in the form. Right under my name, the form asked for my mobile number, and I thought for the first time: “Yes! That is exactly what I need. I am the last person who should be trusted with civic property. My failure to return it now becomes your responsibility, Mayor of Liverpool Joe Anderson.”

And then I remembered a crucial detail. “I don’t know what my mobile number is,” I explained to the librarian supervising my form-filling. “I never have to ring myself.” I scrabbled through the menus of my phone for a few minutes, under the sceptical glare of the librarian, assuming, eventually correctly, it would be in there somewhere.

If only I’d given it to Google. I’d have had it in a second.

I STOOD before the yawning mouth ready to swallow me up and sighed. This was no place for a man in his very early forties to be – a sentiment with which the lissom young semi-naked people surrounding me no doubt agreed.

Why did I agree to this, I thought? I don’t even like water slides. But sometimes a father has to do some awful and terrible things in order to assert his position as assistant to the head of the family. If I had wussed out of this, my charges would have been able to ride even rougher-shod over me than they normally do.

I am comfortable with playground slides – though no longer able legitimately to use them, as we established last week – but larger slides and I have a complicated history, dating back to the Llandudno Astroglide Incident of 1981.

For those of you who do not know what an Astroglide is – perhaps you were brought up Amish, or in a commune – it is a long, wide slide, separated into lanes, and which undulates from top to bottom. To ride upon the Astroglide, one must sit in a sort of sleeping-bag for masochistic hobbits.

The nine-year-old me was quite excited to be allowed on the Astroglide. I climbed into the mat and pushed off. I whizzed over the first hump, careered horizontally off the second hump, lost the mat mid-air on the way to the third hump, and rolled down the fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh humps.

I ended up in a traumatised, bruised heap at the bottom of the slide, and as I attempted to stagger away the boy who had launched himself after me arrived, at some speed, sweeping my legs from underneath me and sending me into a back flip which would have earned me an Olympic bronze had I landed on my feet, rather than my face.

In a way, it set up the abiding pattern of my life: anticipation, followed by early success, disappointment, humiliation and, finally, pain.

All this went through my head as I waited for the green light which would allow me to fling myself down the chute. The light flicked on and I pushed forward, noting as I went a sign which stated that the proprietors could not be held responsible for any damage caused to clothing by the slide.

What, I thought, as I slithered through the darkness. I thought the whole point of slides was that they were smooth. What sort of damage could be caused by a smooth slide? What sort of idiot designs a slide with…

Whoosh! My train of thought was derailed by the first big drop. I was picking up speed. This was going to be fun, I thought.

And then I emerged into the light. The flume was mostly outdoors. A gust of wind caught my chest, and I suddenly slowed. Wind resistance is the enemy, I realised. I lay on my back and sped up again.

“Ow!” I cried. “That really hurt.” My shoulder blades had scraped against a joint connecting one length of chute to the next, and in the process had slowed me down to a stop. I tried to push myself forward using the sides of the half-pipe but my hands could get no purchase. Apparently the least slippery part of the slide was the bit at the bottom. Or under the bottom.

And I couldn’t sit up. Every time I tried, I slipped back onto my back.

I could see there was another dip ahead, just around the corner. If I could get myself to that before the person behind me arrived, I would be all right. Somehow I managed to move myself to the corner, lying on my back, shuffling my backside – the only part of me able to adhere to the surface. I was relieved there was nobody there to see me. The humiliation would have been unbearable.

I inched around the corner. And there was a teenage girl, who had stopped herself and was, presumably, waiting for friends.

I tried to sit up but could not. All I could do was continue to edge forward, lying on my back, using my buttocks as my only means of propulsion, like a slug doing the backstroke. Her face showed the mixture of pity and disgust that only a teenage girl can display, and which I recognised from my own youth.

I managed to reach the dip before the next person arrived, but it was of little consolation.