We’re going to go to the pool today. I’m going to sit on the edge of the kiddy pool in my bathing suit and my eyes are going to tear from suntan lotion running into them and John and another boy or girl, to be selected from any number of boys and girls at the pool, are going to fight over his excavator, which John brings to the pool and leaves on the side of the pool, but which is not to be touched. An excavator is an extremely potent lure, it will call four-year-olds to it from the deep end, it will pull a stumbling one-year-old through the water holding her mother’s hand. But it is not to be touched!

At the pool everyone is more or less naked, and the veneer of civilization seems very thin. In fact the hold civilization has on us is nowhere better demonstrated than at the pool, where enjoyment is tempered and bent to the ever-present rules.