For those New Yorkers who can’t get away, summer in the city can be brutal – a series of unhappy encounters with rotting garbage and sticky taxi-seats, in which one is constantly being plunged from furnace-like heat into the meat-locker chill of over-airconditioned lobbies and offices.

A rare source of relief is the public pool system – 67 pools in total, across the five boroughs – and one of the last free-ish things in a city where daycare can cost $20,000 a year, family healthcare $800 a month and, in findings released this week, rent routinely equates to two-thirds of the Manhattanite’s salary. By contrast, the public pool and gym complex near my apartment costs $150 a year, less than you’d pay monthly at a private gym chain. The one I used to go to in Brooklyn was free.

Public pools have been in the news this summer for other reasons; they loom large in the history of segregation in the US, particularly out in the suburbs where pool clubs can, by virtue of location, continue to operate on a de facto exclusionary basis. In the city, where communities are more mixed, things are better, although tensions still occasionally flare.

The pool I used to go to in Red Hook, Brooklyn, had a catchment area so large it pulled a genuinely diverse crowd. It was a vast, concrete-bordered complex where T-shirts were banned in case they advertised gang colours. Old ladies in flowery swimming hats did breaststroke alongside thrashing lane-swimmers and boys who threw themselves headlong into the pool. It brought to mind that old safety notice from English pools in the 80s – the one asking patrons to kindly refrain from running, shouting, pushing, bombing, acrobatics and gymnastics, ducking, smoking, swimming in the diving area and, most famously, “petting”.

Historically, the main change to the New York pool scene has been the removal of diving boards; where once there were dozens now, according to a New York Times article last week, there are only three, a casualty of health and safety codes and our era’s lower tolerance for permitting children to experiment with gravity.

On being relatively racist

Some things don’t change. For those who can travel, there are the modestly priced beach clubs of Long Island where, a few weeks ago, a member of an Italian family was overheard remarking that there were “too many Jews” in that quadrant of the club, whereupon the Jews in question began loudly referencing the mafia. Outrage ensued on both sides, and a long discussion as to whether racism towards some races is worse than towards others. No conclusion was reached.

And now, the actual doctor

It is summer-cold season, everyone is sniffing and I have signed on with a new doctor. I’ve been in some uninspiring clinics over the years; one in Greece with a discarded needle on the floor; one with a three-hour wait, in London.

But I can say with confidence that this new surgery on the Upper West Side is the most unnerving of all: the walls are adorned with framed photos of … TV doctors. As I waited in the consultation room, I looked at glitzy portraits of Hugh Laurie as House, Patrick Dempsey as Dr Shepherd and Zach Braff as Dr Dorian. In the corridor outside there was, incredibly, a framed photo of Stephen Mangan from Green Wing. All that was lacking was Dr Spaceman from 30 Rock. (“Hi! I’m Dr Leo Spaceman. I’m a working physician with a degree from the Ho Chi Minh City school of medicine.”) When the doctor came in, a suave guy in his 50s who looked as if he had jumped down from one of the photos, it was impossible not to suspect the whole place was a hoax and he some kind of white-coated imposter.

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