I've been serenading the cleaner in the men's changing room at my local swimming pool.

Last week I sang My Love Is Like a Red Red Rose.

And he in turn has sung me traditional Chinese love songs.

Before you get any funny ideas, let me explain: We don't speak each other's language, but we can communicate by song.

It all began when I heard him singing what seemed to me Peking Opera. He often sang while lying down on a bench with his eyes closed. Other times he warbled in the shower room while moving a mop. I use the word moving advisedly. The mop didn't clean much, but left an impressive wet swath.

While he sang I would nod and smile appreciatively. He has a pleasant tenor voice. Then around Christmas he broke into Jingle Bells, in Chinese. I joined in. Then I followed with a rendition of Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer. By the end we were both beaming.

The other cleaner doesn't sing; he does press-ups. I've seen him do 50 one after the other. But he's little and has short arms, which make press-ups easy.

One day I went downstairs from the changing room and wandered along a corridor. There was what looked like a tai chi class in full swing. All women. They looked graceful, but I didn't linger. I didn't want to appear like a peeping Tom.

I took another flight of stairs to the basement and discovered a fully-equipped gym. It was gloomy but had a variety of serious-looking weightlifting machines, treadmills, free weights, benches and a room full of exercise bikes.

I thought I'd come up trumps. Each visit to the pool and gym costs me 5 yuan (76 US cents), thanks to discount tickets obtained from my employer.

I know suckers, excuse me, colleagues, who have paid 1,500 yuan ($229) to join a gym without a swimming pool.

Talking of the pool. It's pretty cool, literally. Not, I venture, as cold as slipping into an ice hole in Houhai lake, but cool enough to banish a hangover.

Someone has thoughtfully placed plastic spittoons at the ends of each of the six lanes. There's a sign on the pool wall that says "No Frolic".

The sign reminds me of similar signs on the walls of pools in Scotland when I was a boy: "No horseplay."

As a 7-year-old I puzzled why anyone would want to play with a horse in a swimming pool.

But to get back to my main character, today the cleaner was asleep on a bench in the changing room. How can anyone sleep on a hard wooden bench? It was his lunch break. Other days I see him having lunch, a bowl of rice, in the changing room. He's probably seen more naked men than he's had hot bowls of rice. I sang By Yon Bonny Banks (of Loch Lomond) quietly so as to not awaken him.

Last week after what sounded like an aria from him, I broke into Waltzing Matilda. He smiled and nodded, picked up the tune and sang phrases. Other men in the changing room looked at me strangely. Probably thought I was nuts, but harmless.

The cleaner knows I'm from Scotland. In my best Chinese I explained: "Su ge lan".

He indicated that men wore skirts there. It was probably unnecessary on my part to mime playing the bagpipes and make the sounds Wa Wa Wawa Wa WaWa (Scotland the Brave).

I'm going to try a bit of Spanish on the cleaner, with the song Cuando Sali de Cuba (When I left Cuba). I learned it from the Spanish stillroom workers in a Scottish border hotel where I worked after leaving school.

They used to play keepy-uppy - a game with the objective of keeping an object from touching the ground - with teacups. They were remarkably skillful and smashed only two or three cups per shift.

Speaking of keepy-uppy. I'm impressed by my Chinese women colleagues who are masters of ti jianzi, a kind of keepy-uppy with a large shuttlecock. But that's another story.