Swam 1K.
The pool opened yesterday, but though I drove and had my gym bag I declined to go to the club immediately after work because I didn't have my suit with me and the weather meant I had to be outside, gardening if not swimming, not inside on a machine. So today, after a few more hours in the vegetable garden, I swam.
Thank goodness for heated water. It was lovely. Sixty-degree sun meant getting out wasn't painful either.
I am so glad to have access to an outdoor pool. This city is much more palatable now that I can swim when the weather says swim, instead of for only the hottest two months.
I liked this one more than Sons and Lovers or Women in Love. In fact, I liked it just fine, except for its one gratuitous, incongruous line of racism: black women like sex more than white women, but the lover's objection to them is that "we're white men and they're...muddy."
One contemporary review said that it was fine except where the gamekeeping was interrupted by romance. There was actually almost no gamekeeping; it was more like the romance interrupted speechifying on political economics, industrialism, and how machinery has killed the life in man. That's a better theme to discuss in the three books of his I've read than relationshipping and navel-gazing. This one had plenty of relationshipping but, thankfully, very little navel-gazing.
I knew nothing of this novel going in, except that it was banned and scandalous because the love relationship crossed social lines and was explicit. I had expected more explicit scenes, but besides a couple of quite mild scenes the only mention of smut was in the word's original meaning, relating to the coal heaps of Lancashire.