When an engineer finally arrived I told him about the police incident. He seemed unsurprised. The engineer said that when phone lines earth, they often automatically send a call to the emergency services. I could not help dwelling on the image: the holm oak had lived a grand life, through the Napoleonic Wars, the Industrial Revolution and series one to twelve of The X Factor, and must have known its time was nigh, but as it breathed its last it was still desperate enough to call the emergency services for help.
‘Maybe it was trying to get hold of Special Branch,’ said the engineer. He told me that the damage the tree had done to the line was now repaired and my phone and broadband were once again functioning. ‘Anyway,’ he continued. ‘It’s all a bit of a moot point.’
‘Oh really? Why’s that?’ I asked.
‘Your line was already more or less buggered. It had been chewed to ribbons by all these squirrels around here.’
8
BOATS AGAINST THE CURRENT
The small lido where I swim during the summer months is unheated and when I arrive is often empty. When I first used to get in I’d lower my torso into the water very gingerly and wince a bit, but in more recent times being semi-naked and immersed in cold water has become such a normal state for me I throw fuck to the wind and hurl myself right in, barely noticing the chill. I take a little while to get going, not just because I’m warming up but because my first couple of lengths necessitate several detours, as I rescue the handful of bumblebees that are invariably flailing about upside down on the pool’s surface. If the bees are near the edge of the pool I do this with a cupped hand beneath the water and a gentle scooping motion that I hope will not hurt the bee or result in a sting, but sometimes when the bee is more centrally located I will return to my clothes pile and fetch an espadrille or a flip-flop, hold it aloft while swimming one-armed, then use it to lift the bee out of the water onto the concrete slabs at the side. If anyone who lives in the flats near the pool is watching me from their window, this must look very strange. This man is very committed to his latest piece of performance art, I can imagine them thinking. He believes he is all alone, unobserved, but he still goes through with it in such a serious manner. It is sad yet kind of admirable.
A lot of people might think it slightly unhygienic to swim around in the company of insects, but I regularly push the envelope of my aquatic interspecies social life into far more perilous bacterial territory. Last summer, on the hottest day of the year, I swam in the River Dart with my friends James, Bea, Monika and Helen. ‘Wow, this is amazing!’ we said to each other as we bobbed about in water much warmer than the lido, the smell of a barbecue drifting over from the shore and an early-evening sun winking through the boughs of the oaks overhanging the bank. Then we got out, towelled ourselves dry and watched in silence as a Jersey heifer lowered itself into the shallows and released a huge, hot jet of piss into an area only a few feet from where we had just been doing breaststroke.
I generally prefer to swim further upstream than this in the Dart, beyond the South Hams towns of Totnes and Buckfastleigh and their sewage plants, where it’s easier to convince yourself that the water is clear and pure and blank out the fact that there might be a decomposing ram wedged between two algae-shined rocks just seven or eight hundred yards around the corner. I have given more thought to these issues since my first year in Devon, when, as an almost certain result of overzealous river swimming, I developed a urinary tract infection right out of the top drawer of Satan’s tallboy, which subsequently degenerated into full-blown prostatitis. Early on a Saturday last July I traipsed a couple of miles north from the moor’s edge along rocky banks, past half a dozen canoeists, an elderly hippy couple sitting on the bank hand in hand and a lanky Rapunzel-haired girl with a feed bucket calling to three ponies, until finally I was alone next to a deep clear pool of black-gold water. I stood on a natural granite platform around twenty feet above the pool’s surface and envisaged the hidden jagged underwater rock that would slice mercilessly through my thigh muscle, leaving me stranded and bleeding as the cold, unforgiving moorland night thundered down. Then I thought, Ah, to hell with it! and jumped in anyway. In my defence I had previously done a reconnoitre of water depth and underwater rock location because, contrary to what some of my recent swimming missions
