Psychogeography

Wild Water

The river: it enfolds us in its icy embrace. Superficially, it isn’t turbid, only an insistent, coiled, supremely powerful inertia. Stop swimming for an instant, and I can feel it push me downstream at a steady 2 mph. There are seven of us abreast, holding to the centre of the Avon; the river is chilly with the run-off of the August rainstorms, and our engagement with the water is profound and elemental. The Avon takes us all and subsumes us to its own relentless pulsion. The heads of my fellow swimmers are otter-sleek as they dip and rise. We are no longer human, I feel, as we contemplate the grassy banks, only understudies for some yet-to-be-realised production of The Wind in the Willows.

Charles — whose land runs along the bank — chooses this moment, with supreme tact, to tell us about the 450-lb pike he’s recently seen stuffed in a local museum. A pike caught in this very river. At once our white legs and whiter bellies are lures flickering beneath the surface; the ancient, bony fish are rising from the river bed, intent on teaching us a lesson, sending us back to our tiled paddling pools with a vengeance. We do not belong here — we belong there, minus a limb. Or two.

It’s been a summer of wild-water swimming for me. As middle age advances I feel myself more and more drawn to plunging into lakes, tarns, rivers and, of course, the sea. The wild-water swimmers’ guru was the writer and broadcaster Roger Deakin, who very sadly died last month, aged only sixty-three. His book Waterlog told the story of his peculiar, liquid odyssey across Britain, splashing off the Scillies, plashing on Dartmoor, breasting the chalk-bed stream of the Itchen, tumbling down watery chutes in the Yorkshire Dales. It’s a beautiful, melancholic and yet intensely celebratory account of one man’s total immersion in our environment and I urge you all to read it.

Deakin wasn’t just a wild-water swimming enthusiast — he was a campaigner for the rights of us all to roam as freely in liquid as we would like to on land. Agencies, councils, fishing clubs and landowners are all intent on barring the swimmer from the swim. They scaremonger with Weil’s disease, a nasty rat-borne malaise which can be avoided with simple precautions, such as not swimming with open wounds on your body. However, the risks of ‘rough’ swimming are obvious: fish hooks, currents, whirlpools, cramps, pike and weed — a gamut of challenges which healthily affirm that you are where you ought to be: in the welter of the world, not a place apart.

I’ve swum this year in the Avon, the Thames, Loch Lomond; and in the sea, off the Orcadian island of Westray, Hurst Beach in the Solent, Barcelona, Ibiza, and many times at Brighton. The practice never jades me, each fresh dousing only invigorates. The land seen from wild water is another country, waiting to be rediscovered as you stagger ashore, while the water itself cradles you in its diluvian embrace.

I so loved my wild-water swimming this summer that I couldn’t bear the season to end. I dragged the kids down to Brighton for a final float in choppy waves, staring up at the rococo madness of the Palace Pier. Back, banged up in London’s prison, I found myself last weekend on Hampstead Heath, and went to swim in Highgate men’s pond.

It was a long time since I’d swum there, and I noted that the chest-waxers — who for years have been in the ascendant — have now all but eased out that other moiety: nude, pot-bellied, old Jewish men playing hard ball. No matter — and no matter either that the pond, fed from the source of the River Fleet, probably isn’t natural at all, but an exercise in Georgian landscaping. The important thing is that its margins are muddy, it’s surrounded by trees and grass, and the peerlessly elegant forms of swans glide across it. Still, the stentorian notice warning of the presence of blue-green algae in the water was off-putting.

I ignored it and dove right in. After all, I’d ignored the signs that said you shouldn’t swim off Hurst Beach, and I’d shamelessly swum outside the coastguard flags on Brighton Beach. I’d even ignored the plague of jellyfish infesting the Mediterranean. But for how long can this go on? Deakin’s book took its inspiration from a John Cheever story ‘The Swimmer’, the protagonist of which ‘swims home’ across the pools and rivers of his New England district. We all want to swim home, don’t we, and dive into that natal cleft? Yet I fear we’re all about to be landed, gutted, stuffed, and put on display in a local museum.