The current in the pool was benign, but when I swam up to the waterfall at the top end I realised that I was no longer moving forward and got a sense of what a formidable monster its force could be on a harsher day after some customarily heavy Devonian rainfall. As I walked back to the car and dripped dry in the sun and breeze I felt a cold electricity in my fingertips, and my entire body seemed to have a coating of dark, magic renewal, as if it had found something in the water that reminded my body what it really was, before all this distraction we tentatively call being a person. I returned home, faffed for a while in a delusional attempt to work, then got in the car and headed to the sea to swim some more. A mild but spectacular fret came in over the cliffs as I arrived, giving the Gammon Head rock the appearance of a smoky sea volcano. A sensible person might have turned back, but I have done various bits of research into being a sensible person over the last couple of decades and decided it’s not for me.
Over the last year or two I have become slightly addicted to swimming, and nobody is more surprised about this than I am. The last time I was addicted to swimming was between the ages of six and nine, when, over summer weeks that take on a quality of endlessness in my memory, I would dive repeatedly into an Italian swimming pool under a fierce sun and transform with great alacrity into a small sinewy human Brazil nut. My dad, reliving a Mediterranean childhood he’d never had, would dive beside me, no less boisterously, then play energetic games of table tennis against Germans and Italians and Austrians on a table down some steps behind the pool. ‘OOH, YOU BASTARD,’ I’d hear my dad saying to Germans and Italians and Austrians, as I got ready to dive into the pool again. ‘GOOD SHOT.’ These Italian holidays are such a large, powerful part of me that, any time I’m now in the lido and I get water up my nose, I am dizzied by a time travel stronger than that evoked by any smell. With this arrives a dramatic feeling of ambivalence. On the one hand, I have swimming-pool water up my nose, which is never pleasant; on the other, it’s 1983, I am back in Tuscany, nobody’s ever expressed an emotion via a GIF, I’ve spent the morning listening to Remain in Light by Talking Heads and I am about to eat earth’s greatest pizza for less than what you would now pay for a pencil. All people have years when they are more them than they are in other years, and 1982, 1983 and 1984 were all years when I was very me. This is probably a big reason why I swim. I also like the way it has changed my body, without me having to go within a mile of a gym, which is something I would rather pan-fry one of my own internal organs than do.
You have to be careful about saying this stuff nowadays, when technology has opened up whole new virtual corridors for fitness boasters to strut down, flexing their biceps and sticking their squat-toned rears in your face. People nowadays want to hear that you are abandoning your responsibilities to your body and bingeing on doughnuts and a six-pack of extra-strength budget lager. They do not want to hear that you are getting fitter than you have been for years, and they especially do not want to see a blow-by-blow record of it. So I will leave my fitness bragging at this: I feel better as the skinny slightly wiry person I’ve been since swimming a lot than the slightly skinny not all that wiry person I was before. I don’t think it’s for everybody, and I don’t even find skinny slightly wiry people especially attractive myself. Do whatever you want to do and don’t let a stranger dictate how you live your life. Eat some fried stuff with cheese, maybe? It’s nice.
I hesitate to call what I do wild swimming because I’ve always thought that’s a bit like calling lawn mowing ‘wild vacuuming’, but I do sometimes call it wild swimming because lots of people do, and joining in makes communication easier, and I think it would be needlessly intransigent of me to completely boycott the term ‘wild swimming’. Like a lot of people, I first attempted some more adventurous swimming in earnest after reading the inspiring book Waterlog by Roger Deakin, the late nature writer who lived only a couple of miles up the road from my house, across the border from Norfolk into Suffolk. Deakin won me over with the freedom of his writing and lifestyle, describing muzak as ‘chlorinated music’, and by being the first person apart from me I had come across who used the word ‘endolphins’ instead of ‘endorphins’. But perusing the excerpts from my diaries in 2010 and 2011 that centred around the indoor pool where I had been swimming; however, I can see that there might have been more than just Deakin’s prose nudging me out into open water.
1 August 2010
I’m like most people when I’m getting changed in a public area: I keep my eyes down, myself to myself and my turning circle tight. But when, as was the case today, a man is standing in front of me, meticulously drying his pubic hair with a hairdryer, it is very hard not to notice.
4 August 2010
They played that awful Duffy song at the pool today and I hid underwater until it was over.
29 September 2010
No sign of Guy Who Blowdries His Pubes at the pool today but it
