I’d had my eye on another swimming challenge: a more ambitious one but one I still viewed as very manageable. This was to swim around Burgh Island, a rocky mound off the mainland near the village of Bigbury on Sea, with its own pub and art deco hotel. I chose a Saturday for my mission, which wasn’t ideal in parking terms. Having found the main car park at Bigbury on Sea full, I left my car up the road in the memorably named Economy Beach Car Park. This cost me four pounds, although it had only been a pound back in January, when it was the subject of possibly the most forlorn photograph I have ever taken of the British seaside. It is not just the economy beach car park sign, the advertised one-pound fee and the bleak hillside beyond that make this photo, but the centrally framed bin and clump of pampas grass. ‘Hey! Married couples! Come and do your swinging here!’ it seems to say. ‘But please take care to dispose of all rubbish afterwards.’ That said, it is not my favourite photo out of those I took at Bigbury on Sea during my winter walk there. My favourite photo out of those I took at Bigbury on Sea during my winter walk there is of a lone windswept sheep on the bare hillside above the village, gazing off towards the art deco hotel on Burgh Island as if dreaming of one day staying in its plushest suite.
Now, seven months later, with the island in my sights, I walked down the hill to Bigbury Beach from the car park, then across the tidal causeway, dodging numerous sandcastles and selfie-takers, but by the time I’d waded out to the island I was alone save for a rockpooling father and his two teenage sons. I removed my T-shirt and reached in my bag for the float my dad had bought me and realised it was still in the car. That’s a shame, I thought only two-thirds sarcastically. I placed my bag on a rock and swam out eighty yards through gaps in the rocks in a pungent, fishy sea. The tide was coming in and the waves were medium-big, but my front crawl felt strong and effortless and I could sense a solidity and sureness to my shoulder muscles that I had not had the previous summer. But as I rounded the corner to the part of the island furthest from the mainland, I felt an abrupt solitude, and paused. I’d had a lacklustre morning of writing and badly wanted to get round that bend and that other bend beyond it, and feel the sense of accomplishment that went with it, but something was not right.
Here I was again: frivolous me, a non-daredevil non-wetsuit-owning person in five-pound supermarket trunks, but the water didn’t give a crud who I was, just like the water didn’t give a crud who Jeff Buckley was when he swam into the Mississippi in 1997 in an apparently carefree mood, singing a Led Zeppelin song. What was the difference between being Randy California, the strong swimmer in the Pacific with his son, and Randy California, the tragic, drowned singer? What was the difference between being J. G. Farrell, the comic novelist sitting on a rock on the Irish coast fishing, and J. G. Farrell, the tragic novelist dead before his time? The difference was a tiny moment. Terrible sea stuff didn’t just happen far out in open water. My uncle Paul swam less far out on the north Cornish coast than I was now and got swept away by the tide, and would almost certainly not be still with us had a surfer not spotted him and come to his rescue.
I turned round. I swam back past the rockpooling family and clambered out of the water over slimy, limpet-covered rocks. I walked purposefully across the beach and up the hill. I got into my car, painfully aware I had not wrung anywhere near my money’s worth out of the Economy Beach Car Park. I drove away. The interior of the car smelled of damp and crisps, which was entirely logical since when I was in it I was very often damp and eating crisps. Still in my trunks, I went directly to the lido, which like all lidos was originally built to take the place of swimming in seas and rivers and lakes for several reasons, many of which remain valid to this day. I swam forty-six lengths. I didn’t feel closer to the earth or my primal self, but I felt good and alive. I noticed a bumblebee on the far side of the deep end. I must have missed it when I got in. I transferred it to dry land, where it shook itself and staggered away. It was a quite large and beautifully furry one – almost fluffy in fact. It had probably been drawn to the water by the glint of the sun on the surface, but it did not have a sense of its own limits.
9
BLACK DOG
Fur and Sherbet
It was a thankless winter’s day, a nagging wind was shaking the last stalwart leaves from the trees, and I was trying to find some picture hooks so I could hang a couple
