I’m getting quite good at this swimming lark. I did another 2km tonight - that’s a mile and a quarter. By the end my legs were starting to ache, but after the first 50 lengths I’d got into a good rhythm and was zizzing backwards and forwards as though it was something I’d been doing all my life.

I got away with last night’s 1 mile trawl, still feeling sufficiently flexible this morning to scoot around on the way to work. Tonight, though, I think bad things may be stored up for the near future. I’m still aching as I sit here, and that’s despite sitting in the steam room and the jacuzzi, and eating a banana when I got home.

I’d been intending to have salad, but ended up tuning in to the end of Start the Week on Radio 4 in the car on the way back from the pool, and they were talking about how unhygenic bagged salad is. Most of it, they said, is torn up by poorly paid illegal immigrants, and the standards of cleanliness in the factories where it’s done are so low that the lettuce is then washed in a chlorine solution 20 times more concentrated than you find in a swimming pool.

Considering my eyes were stinging at the time the idea of putting that inside me was somewhat offputting.

Anyhow, even that doesn’t get rid of all the bacteria, apparently, and a surprising quantity of the bags were found to still contain e-coli when they were tested by government inspectors.

I know what this means, of course: you shouldn’t buy bagged lettuce. The woman on the radio was saying you couldn’t get it before 1992 anyway, and before that time we always used to wash our own lettuces, which I distinctly remember.

Helping hands, then, do not necessarily equal hygiene, regardless of the washed and ready to eat claims on the side of the bag.

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