Growing up in Glasgow in the 1980s – in small, terraced public housing – the idea that I might one day own my own swimming pool felt impossible, laughable, insane. Even the concept of a third bedroom or (gasp) a second toilet was bewildering to me.
In all my years living in Scotland, I only remember seeing one house with a swimming pool. A gigantic mansion atop of a swathe of farmland on the outskirts of my village.
I wasn't cut out for a life of crime, but for most of my childhood I dreamt of owning a house with a swimming pool
The owner had two terrifying great danes that, from a distance, could pass for sizable ponies. Next to his house was a second building. Inside, a luxurious swimming pool. I can't be 100% sure, but I'm fairly certain the owner was a career criminal.
I wasn't cut out for a life of crime, but for most of my childhood I dreamt of owning a house with a swimming pool.
It was an obsession that began with the TV show Neighbours.
Where my pool dream began
Cast your mind back to 1987. Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan. A six-year-old Mark Serrels rushing home from school to watch Neighbours, an Australian soap opera set in a fictionalised suburb in Melbourne. I remember the intro like it was yesterday. The iconic theme song, the charming game of street cricket then…
Swimming pools.
Legs dangling aimlessly in the cool water, friends doing cannonballs as the sun danced on the clear, sparkling surface. In those moments Australia truly did feel like a lucky country, a land abound with nature's gifts.
Swimming pools in every garden, as far as the eye could see.
I wanted it so badly I could taste it.
Is this good?
Too many broken hearts
Flash forward, 2024. I'm living in Sydney Australia, standing in front of the swimming pool I once dreamt of.
It's a nightmare.
There are leaves everywhere. Floating on the surface and lurking down below. The foliage I can handle, more concerning is the layer of dead algae lingering at the bottom. I have zero idea how to deal with it.
Months earlier I'd come close to giving up on my swimming pool entirely. For years, I'd been using an online app to keep track of my pool. It magically timed when the chlorinator and filter pump should and shouldn't run and alerted me when I needed to add salt or other chemicals.
It was a set and forget situation until it all of a sudden it wasn't. When the app started getting fussy and disconnecting I had no idea how to fix it. Within weeks my crystal clear pool looked like Shrek's swamp, a dense, prehistoric green body of water no sentient being had any business swimming in.
My old pool cleaner, affectionately referred to as "Kylie".
I turned off the app and took matters into my own hands, buying a bucket load of chemicals designed to murder the algae taking up residence in my pool.
But once it was dead, I had a new problem – removing the dusty dead algae from the pool. My little robot cleaner – affectionately named Kylie – was not fit for the task. It was a decent enough unit for the everyday task of picking up leaves and rogue branches, but this mission was a step too far for Kylie. The old robot would have to be decommissioned.
And as I always do when I have some kind of problem in my life, I approached the boffins at CHOICE. Thankfully, our reviews and testing team were in the process of testing the latest batch of pool cleaners and were more than happy for me to borrow one.
The Aiper just looked cool. Modern, sleek, fancy lights, multiple different cleaning modes
Enter the Aiper Scuba S1. This new, cutting edge pool cleaner topped CHOICE's rigorous testing and I could immediately see why. It was cordless, which ruled.
A perennially kinked cord was one of the many reasons why Kylie couldn't effectively clean my cursed swimming pool. And the Aiper just looked cool. Modern, sleek, fancy lights, multiple different cleaning modes. An absolute beast of a pool cleaner.
I decided to call it Jason.
Meet "Jason", my new pool cleaner. Save me Jason!
Especially for you
My swimming pool wasn't always an unmitigated disaster. Once upon a time it was everything I'd dreamed of.
When I first thought about moving from an apartment to a house here in Sydney, a swimming pool was the first thing on my mind. No pool, no deal. I was turning my Australian dream into reality one open home at a time. To this day I'm still not sure if I even like the house we ended up living in. It was simply the cheapest house we saw with a fully functioning swimming pool.
The pool became the centre of my Australian life
I'll never forget the day I moved in. We unloaded the furniture, the fridge, the washing machine – but before we'd even unpacked all the cardboard boxes, my two kids and I decided to jump in the pool. It was July – the middle of winter. We checked the water temperature afterwards: 11 degrees, the lower end of what an ice bath is supposed to be.
The pool became the centre of my Australian life. Summers didn't officially start until the first freezing swim with the family. Seasons were defined by whether or not we swam in the pool on the weekend. For a while I made the habit of going straight into the pool immediately after waking up every morning. It felt amazing. If I found myself in a bad mood, or had a challenging day at work, I'd go for a quick swim when I went home. Instant bliss.
Last year my Scottish family flew over to Australia for Christmas, visiting my new house for the very first time. I remember my wife cleaning the house from top to bottom in preparation.
For a while I made the habit of going straight into the pool immediately after waking up every morning
Me? I spent the majority of my time scrubbing the pool to a sparkling sheen. The day before they arrived I spent hours making it perfect. Not a single leaf, not a single grain of sand. I stood tall, surveyed my domain in all its splendour.
Then 30 minutes after I went back inside a gust of wind sent a rogue group of leaves careening into the pool. It was devastating. Pool management is nothing if not a sisyphean task.
But I loved it regardless. Well, I loved it until I didn't. Until my swimming pool went from a sparkling paradise, to a green, murky millstone hanging around my neck.
This is a fancy product shot. My pool has never looked this good and it never will.
Locomotion
I sent Jason into the depths. Where Kylie had struggled, perhaps he could prevail.
With robotic precision, Jason set about his task. Unburdened by kinked cables he roamed freely, cutting perfect lines through a graveyard of dead algae.
But within minutes he disappeared, swallowed in the murky depths as dust rose from the surface and clouded the once crisp, clear water. It became immediately apparent that Jason, much like Kylie, might struggle to vacuum all the algae in one shot.
When I pulled the Aiper Scuba S1 out of the pool, it was clear that Jason had put in one hell of a shift
This was going to be harder than I thought.
But when I pulled the Aiper Scuba S1 out of the pool, it was clear that Jason had put in one hell of a shift. The basket wasn't just full of leaves and debris, it was jam packed.
While my pool was still cloudy with algae, my main man Jason had definitely made a difference. The dead algae coverage had been reduced. What was once a carpet of dust was a little more splotchy. Result.
It took five pool cleaner runs and many painstaking hours of brushing and backwashing. But folks, we did it. Jason and I got my pool back.
The nightmare was over. Well sort of.
We're back baby!
Any dream will do
All of my swimming pool dreams came true, but dreams never really play out the way you expect.
Swimming pools are expensive, obviously. But I don't think too much about that. I don't know how much my pool costs to run and to be honest, I don't wanna know.
Sporadic Google searches suggest it can run into the thousands. It stings to walk into a pool shop and leave with $200 worth of chemicals, but I believe it's best to simply switch my frontal lobe off and enjoy my pool like the primitive man I am.
Pool nice. Brain empty.
It's a lot of work, but I don't mind. There's something meditative about early Saturday mornings spent mindlessly scooping leaves out of a pool. I feel like a very boring middle-aged monk with a bo-staff, perfecting his craft.
There's something meditative about early Saturday mornings spent mindlessly scooping leaves out of a pool
Perhaps the weirdest issue is the shame.
Sometimes I'm a little embarrassed by my pool. I realise this is a weird reaction – a very Scottish reaction. Where I come from having a pool is "posh" and baulking at that is embedded in my DNA. Australians talk about 'tall poppy syndrome' but Scottish people will rip the poppy out at the root, trample on it for an hour, then spit on its grave for good measure.
Australians talk about 'tall poppy syndrome' but Scottish people will rip the poppy out at the root, trample on it for an hour, then spit on its grave for good measure
I can't pretend I haven't felt weird about owning a pool. Sometimes I'll be out there swimming blissfully on a Sunday evening and rogue thoughts will penetrate: 'you don't deserve this, you're a gigantic fraud – a fake – and it's only a matter of time before your entire life crumbles into a fine, dead algae dust'.
But hey – at least my pool is clean. For now.
Thank you Jason.
Thank you Neighbours.
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Stock images: Getty, unless otherwise stated.
