Floating Read online

  I developed a strong line in self-loathing. I would beat myself up for not casting around for work, for failing to come up with good ideas, for not living the freelance life I had always dreamt of. I stopped leaving the flat on weekdays, except for quick local errands. It just felt easier to stay in and hide away and succumb to that deep sense of guilt about wasting time, about not making enough of the gift I had somehow been granted.

  Working alone was proving to be dangerous. It drove me to retreat into myself and becoming lost in a dark world where I felt useless, incapable and, worst of all, embarrassed to tell anyone how I felt. Seeking professional help felt, at that time, pointless to me. To my mind, this was all in my head. I was the only person who had ever felt like this and I was making it all up.

  Ultimately, I came to realise that my anxiety was related to my inability to deal with events and emotions that were fleeting. I placed obsessive emphasis on the smallest details. I could work myself into a state of extreme worry about everything from making a phone call to paying the gas bill to whether I’d offended someone by asking them to pay me on time for work I had completed months previously.

  I had somehow taught myself to believe that I could worry things right. A deep fug settled over me that would not lift. It felt like living with a permanent, low-level hangover.

  Life continued along these similar lines for a couple of years. The feelings came in waves, and there were times when my self-worth and my self-belief came back briefly, buoyed by an interesting commission or long days spent with Keeley, walking around the commons of south-west London or lolling on the benches around Tooting Bec Lido.

  Without her, I often wonder what would have happened to me, whether I would have even discovered swimming in the way that I did on that sunny afternoon at Hampstead. I felt enormous guilt for feeling continually anxious and hateful towards myself when this woman was only ever supportive, encouraging and full of love. She was the one who had joined me on my first swim, who had suggested we go to Hampstead to break the torpor of a too-hot summer’s day, and I felt I owed it to her as much as myself to try and make myself feel better again.

  I had lost all the confidence I had built up in my early twenties. My natural extrovert state was undermined by a growing willingness to go into myself. I felt drained of enthusiasm for anything. I knew this upset Keeley as much it upset me. She could see how low I was, even if it took me a long time to be honest about my anxiety and depression. Her solicitude for me at my lowest moments knew no bounds, but I had to find a way to fix myself. I did not believe that it was fair to ask her to do that for me.

  In swimming, I found the only thing that truly broke me out of my anxious cycle for longer than a few moments. There was a long, deep burn of satisfaction and calm that followed in the wake of my bow wave. So I swam to fix myself, to cure myself and to make myself a better person in my own eyes. In the water there was nothing. My mind was empty and I floated without thinking. I could just be, without perceived judgement.

  That first swimming summer was beginning to taper off, but my willingness to paddle on until the cloak of winter wrapped itself over London led me to investigate more about wild swimming and its benefits. I began buying guidebooks and scouring the web for information on heated pools, hidden river swims and like-minded swimmers.

  It was on one such search that I discovered the name of Roger Deakin. Deakin’s Waterlog kept cropping up again and again, mentioned as a hallowed text for those looking to eschew the echo chamber of the indoor pool for something more visceral. I tracked down a copy and devoured it in a two-day session, imagining myself swimming in all of the far-off destinations he visited: the sweeping bays of the Isles of Scilly; the roaring of the Gulf of Corryvreckan; and the moat (really two ponds) which ran along the back and front of Walnut Tree Farm, his Elizabethan farmhouse in Suffolk.

  Deakin, it seemed, was the archetypal English eccentric. He appeared to care little for what others thought of him and ploughed a singular furrow, swimming in lakes, rivers, streams and canals which he saw as representing a Britain that was fast disappearing in the late 1990s. He was a zoologist, a natural historian educated at Cambridge and a man with a deep and intimate knowledge of the British countryside.

  This much I garnered from the 330 pages of Waterlog. But as much as Roger’s evocative writing about place, I found his musings on how swimming could affect life profound and helpful.

  ‘You see and experience things when you’re swimming in a way that is completely different from any other,’ he wrote. ‘You are in nature, part and parcel of it, in a far more complete and intense way than on dry land, and your sense of the present is overwhelming.’

  This was the same survival instinct I had felt deeply in Hampstead mixed pond.

  But more than that, it was Roger’s insistence that ‘water has always held the magical power to cure.… I can dive in with a long face and what feels like a terminal case of depression, and come out a whistling idiot’, that hit me hardest. It was as if those lines were written directly for my benefit, almost twenty years after they had first been written in Roger’s creaking home. If I had been interested before, I was obsessed now. I took up the concept of wild swimming with a religious zeal.

  I read and reread Roger’s book until my copy of Waterlog became tattered, its pages falling out. I carried it with me on the swims I’d take across London, reading it whenever I found myself anxious and unable to put on my swimming shorts and take a quick dip. Roger’s words acted as a quick fix whenever I found myself feeling low.

  It was on a midweek jaunt at Hampstead mixed pond, while swimming along the boundary rope and lying on my back to catch the sun as it peeped through bubbling cloud, that I first thought of retracing Roger’s footsteps on a grand journey across the UK. I loved swimming at Hampstead, but the shouts of kids diving in off the jetty was puncturing the mood somewhat. A swim in Roger’s footsteps would give me the opportunity to see the Britain he had discovered and also the chance to see how much, if at all, it had changed in the intervening twenty years. Wild swimming was booming, thanks in no small part to Roger’s work, and I wanted to see if attitudes towards it had changed too.

  Swimming outdoors had become a mainstream activity since Roger undertook his journey in the mid-1990s. The subject of countless broadsheet articles and glossy magazine spreads, wild swimming now had its own guidebooks. It was no longer a niche activity for borderline eccentrics. The mixed pond’s popularity surely proved it.

  As my journey began to gain momentum and take over my life in a way I could not have foreseen, I visited countless lidos and river-swimming spots where dozens of swimmers ploughed up and down or simply lolled in the shallows. Lido culture, so long something suppressed – pools filled with concrete and art deco gems left to rot and return to nature – was booming. London wasn’t shutting outdoor pools any more, as it was in Roger’s time, but opening them. In the years it took me to retrace Roger’s breaststrokes, the capital gained a fabulous new unchlorinated pool on a building site in King’s Cross, while swimming campaigners raised funds for a bath on the South Bank of the Thames.

  Saltdean Lido near Brighton was set to reopen and millions of pounds were raised to restore Penzance’s spectacular triangular pool after it was destroyed by storms lashing in from the Atlantic. There seemed to be a willingness to accept that chucking yourself into cold water was not something bizarre, but rather something to be embraced, a bracing way to see our landscape anew. I appeared to have come to wild swimming at just the right time.

  But beyond the notion of investigating our nation’s new-found love affair with cold water, I believed that tackling Roger’s nationwide pilgrimage would be a way to fix my anxiety once and for all, to make that post-swim high last forever. I fast developed a strong faith in the power of water to cure, taking Roger’s words as gospel; Britain’s rivers, beaches, lakes and lidos offering the chance of a regular baptism to protect me against the worries I battled daily. If a weekly swim at Hamp
stead allowed me to come back to myself for a few hours, what could a huge, all-encompassing journey do?

  At that point I believed that swimming across the country could be the panacea for all my anxieties. That if I swam everywhere Roger had, I would be cured and could live a life without the scourge of constant worry. One which didn’t mean days on end beating myself up over trivial details and feeling guilty for doing as I pleased.

  While it certainly started that way, I quickly learnt that I’d need things other than swimming to make myself better. I was to discover that the physical and mental journeys I had undertaken, while closely related, were not quite the same. Swimming administered first aid, but it was an unexpected event that occurred during my adventure which would finally help me to arrive where I am now, capable of recognising my anxiety and coping with it. Finding that essential cure went beyond just soaking myself in cold water. But without undertaking the trip and immersing myself in his journey, I am convinced that I would not have made it at all.

  Beyond the need to get out of my own head and break away from my obsessions and anxieties, I thought such a long trip could be a great way to learn more about Britain’s waterways and their place in nature too. Unlike Roger, I am not a naturalist. I’ve got a second-class history degree and come from a new town in Essex, and although I love the outdoors, my knowledge of birdlife and Britain’s flora and fauna is cursory at best. This would be a great way to learn. Spending time with the coots of Hampstead Heath had made me hungry to know more about their cohorts, both on and under the water, and swimming seemed like the perfect opportunity way do so. It was, as Roger said, all about being in the scene.

  There would be obstacles. My inability to drive was definitely one of them, making the hardest-to-reach places all but impossible to get to. (Or so I believed on that day in Hampstead mixed pond. In fact, my failure to as much as learn how to release a handbrake would turn out to be an advantage in fixing the longstanding loneliness I felt keenly during my working days in London, when I went into my shell and worried myself senseless.)

  There was also the fact I could swim little more than a kilometre without my arms feeling as if they were going to fall off. My swimming skills were hardly Olympic standard, and while I knew that wasn’t what was required, I knew that tackling some of Roger’s more challenging swims would need a level of stamina and skill which I lacked. Some time in lido fast lanes would be required.

  And, of course, there was Roger’s absence. Roger died after a short illness in 2006 and, in my own, self-inflated way, I felt this would be a fitting tribute to him. A way to thank him for pointing out a way to make myself better and lighten the worries about work, status and responsibility I had loaded myself with.

  My mind was buzzing with possibility when I first resolved to swim in Roger’s wake. In the afterglow of the initial decision, it all seemed so easy. I had no real plan, no concept of it taking any longer than the nine months it had taken Roger to complete, and an overwhelming sense of excitement. I had no idea at the time that this would be a trip that would become more obsessive than my love for the book on which it was based and change me in ways I could not imagine possible. It was time to go swimming.

  — PART ONE —

  Jumping in, Feet First

  ‘When you enter the water, something like metamorphosis happens. Leaving behind the land, you go through the looking-glass surface and enter a new world, in which survival, not ambition or desire, is the dominant aim.’

  ROGER DEAKIN, WATERLOG

  CHAPTER ONE

  August

  Tooting Bec Lido, London – Highgate Men’s Pond, London – River Granta, Cambridgeshire

  The dog days of summer were already here when I left my flat and cycled across south London to Tooting Bec Lido. I was starting my mission late in the year, I knew, but still I moved tentatively, despite the fact that were weren’t many warm weeks left in the year for wild swimming. No swing down to the Scillies for me, where Roger had started; rather a leisurely stroll to a swimming hole I knew well, and which was one of the last Roger visited in Waterlog. It was a metaphorical toe in the water.

  Tooting Bec Lido remains a well-loved south London institution. The ‘Rastafarian doors’ to the cubicles which lined the sides of the pool, which my predecessor spoke of warmly, were still there, but with an added dash of blue to complement the green, yellow and red of Zion.

  A wedding cake fountain sprayed icy water outside the café, which sold tea in styrofoam cups for a quid and two slices of toast for 50p. It was a happy antidote to the expensive coffee and cake culture sweeping this corner of the capital.

  I got changed in a cubicle on the far side, with sloppy wet footprints on the concrete where a previous swimmer had pulled himself free of clinging swim shorts. I left my bag on a bench underneath a framed newspaper article which ran with the headline ‘Come on in, the Water’s Freezing’.

  I had visited Tooting numerous times over the previous couple of summers, but despite this, I still found its waters unaccountably cold, even on a searing hot day. The school holidays were well under way, but for some reason it wasn’t too crowded, so I had a clear, straight route to the distant shallows. At a hundred yards, it remains one of Europe’s largest outdoor pools, and the prospect of swimming lengths was daunting.

  I stood looking down into the bright blue of the deep end, leaf mulch stuck fast to the off-white bottom. I readied myself to jump, counted to three and found myself still standing there.

  A nervousness washed over me and suddenly I was back at the local pool in Bishops Stortford, aged eleven, on my first ever PE lesson at secondary school. Six fellow swimmers from the bottom ability group looked up at me from the water, three metres deep, each one in a silicone cap, nose clips giving their shouts of encouragement a deep, nasal quality which age had yet to truly gift them. I stared back at them before turning to the swimming tutor in fear.

  ‘I can’t do it,’ I told her.

  ‘You can,’ she said. Standing above the deep end of Tooting Bec Lido, I swear I had the memory of her hand firmly on the small of my back, ready to give me some physical impetus. I was almost certainly projecting that little detail.

  The thing was, I couldn’t. In front of six classmates and now an entire pool of other students from different groups turning to watch, I was having a very public meltdown. I suppose you could call it a panic attack. Because even at that age, I was a hopeless worrier. If there was something to fret about, I would fret about it. Homework, offending my friends, trying to be popular with new classmates. It seemed normal and everyday then in the way it felt debilitating and tedious now.

  Inevitably, the tears came. As they did, I was walked back down the pool and helped to jump in at five-metre intervals, until, finally, I was back at the three-metre mark.

  I flopped myself in and an ironic cheer went up. I broke out my best doggy paddle to the nearest steps and climbed out.

  I felt a sense of pride along with a deep sense of shame for showing my emotions so openly to a group of merciless peers who at that point I hardly knew. Packing my swimming kit into a plastic Dennis the Menace bag afterwards, one of them articulated what I believed to be the entire year’s feelings towards me:

  ‘Why are you such a wuss?’

  My mind refocused on the icy water of Tooting in front of me and tried to push that resurgent memory back to wherever it had come from. I could hear Morrissey singing loud and clear in my head. About smiling now, but being mortified at the time.

  I took a deep breath, began counting to three and chucked myself in at two. The lido’s water completed the necessary ablutions of my anxious mind.

  As I surfaced, I looked at my fellow swimmers. Some wore large goggles and wetsuits, swimming stealthy lengths, practising tumble turns, the recent London Olympics clearly imbuing the regulars with a sense of athletic purpose.

  Head out, I began my long paddle towards the café and the blessed chance of putting my feet down on the bottom. I wou
ldn’t be doing the seventeen lengths required for a mile today – a distance which my predecessor wouldn’t have given a second’s thought to completing. My emulation of Roger’s feats would have to wait. Instead I let the water soothe my mind of work troubles and help it stay in a single place without wandering. I was lost in the moment when I was reminded where I was by a huge slap of water in the face. The wind had whipped up across the lido’s vast surface, creating the kind of chop you’d expect on a south coast beach or a wide expanse of water in the Lake District. I found it amusing that someone would build a pool so big it could emulate properly wild conditions.

  I continued regardless, taking the occasional mouthful and eventually dipping my head, surfacing with my hair slick across my forehead, the sting of hair product and chlorine in my eyes. I wiped my face and swam on with my eyes and nose peering out of the water like a periscope. I managed a measly three lengths before the shivers came on. The backs of my arms pricked with goosebumps as I clambered out at the shallow end, pulling myself up over the side – soaked, happy and no longer aware of my school-age hopelessness when it came to taking the plunge.

  In the spirit of keeping up with Roger’s approach to London swimming, his dips all completed in one short burst, I decided to stick within the M25. I wanted to stay on safe ground, without the need to check OS maps out of the library. My toe-dipping continued at Marshall Street Baths in Soho.