I learnt to swim at Shrewsbury baths when it was still an old Victorian pool, all red brick and high windows and cool shadow. In maybe 1970, they knocked that down and built a modern glass palace, a lot bigger, with seats for spectators and a championship diving board and a gleaming plastic-surfaced caff where you could look through a huge internal window out over the deep end. The best bit of a visit was always the caff, after the swim: it was the only place in town that you could get tomato-flavour crisps, for one thing – I don’t recall the make, not the canonic Smiths or Golden Wonder though – and also there were those excellent long, flattish sausage rolls where warm flaky pastry and delicious greyish sausage seem just about to liquefy. I don’t remember what I liked to drink: I hated all forms of fizzy pop and I’d generally swallowed about half the pool anyway.