Floating Read online

  And so, here we were, on a bright blue day on the English Channel, ready to swim off Chesil beach. Keeley and Emily parked themselves high up the beach, calling out encouragement as we walked over the stones and into the water.

  Tom hopped and gasped on the large, sharp-sided pebbles. I stood and looked up at him towering above me, enjoying his pain as we stripped off in a sharp wind, the crash of the waves behind us. Tom’s thatch of light brown hair ruffled in the breeze, all peaks to match the tips of the waves out to sea.

  One step, two steps and I was out of my depth. This was my first Waterlog sea swim and I could see why Roger had been so wary of these waters, even when they were glassy flat. The pull beneath was incredible, with the waves coming in perpendicular, The waves here are so powerful that the pebbles are graded from ‘small’ at Chesil Beach’s north-west end to ‘large’ where it meets Portland Bill. If the water could do that to rocks, then what could it do to me?

  Roger talked of swimming far out to the horizon here, but Tom and I opted to swim in big circles, pushing out against the current and letting the waves guide us back to shore. Despite the water temperature being little higher than 15°C, it didn’t feel cold. Battling the elements, being ‘in nature’ as my predecessor put it, had sent me into a giddy mood. I couldn’t have been happier as I looked back to shore, waving at the girls while Tom and I babbled about this being the best day of the year.

  By now the sun was really up and we trod water for a time, indulging in what Emily called a ‘water conference’. The four of us had enjoyed one in the more sheltered environs of Lyme Regis just that morning. I told Tom about my worries that I may have cornered myself into a rather lengthy project with my decision to follow Roger around the UK. Guiltily, I left out my true reasons for undertaking the trip.

  ‘Look at how much fun you’re having,’ Tom said reassuringly. ‘It doesn’t matter how long it takes.’

  We swam towards the shore. A huge wave propelled me forward and I clattered back onto the beach on all fours, my hands and knees reddening with the scrape of the shingle. Up went Tom’s yelps of pain again as he padded over to his clothes. Keeley greeted me with a towel, wrapping it round my shoulders and scrabbling me dry.

  She had a knack of making everything feel better, even when I was buzzing with a post-swim dopamine high. While she worked in London, I had set off on this wild trip around the British Isles. Our relationship was such that I had never asked whether she minded when I first set out, but in recent weeks I had asked again and again when I went swimming whether she did. She didn’t. She told me how she could see how much happier swimming, following Roger’s trail, was making me. Her only worries were that I stay safe and not go throwing myself into any particularly dangerous stretches of water. That I stay warm. That I relax and allow myself to enjoy it.

  My toes were still caked with small stones as I yanked on my boots and made my way to the warmth of the café. It was pleasing to look around and see people enjoying the same ‘simple pleasures’ which Roger encountered here. A spot of fishing. Reading in a deckchair, togged up against the wind. A walk along the clifftops in search of fossil fragments and coastal views.

  A pair of swimmers screamed with joy as they waded into the white breakers as we walked back up the beach. It was good to know we weren’t alone in ignoring the whip of the breeze and going in regardless.

  Back in London, I turned Burton Bradstock green on my spreadsheet and cast a worried eye over the dozens of dips left to do. Thankfully, the fear was not enough to stop me continuing my Waterlog mission with fervour. There were more dips to do inside the M25, and none as easy as the Oasis Sports Centre in Covent Garden. This inner-city pool is where Roger came towards the end of his journey, on a cold November afternoon.

  When I arrived it seemed the weather had decided to give one final burst of summer before turning the taps on and reminding us what living in northern Europe was really all about. It was a gloriously warm day, and Joe and I arrived by bike, locking up on High Holborn and entering into a pleasantly calm courtyard where a few swimmers were working their way through languid lengths. The office blocks and high-rise flats around the pool truly make it an oasis, deflecting the noise of the city and giving it an air of escape that can normally only be found in the most secluded of swimming holes.

  The price of admission had unsurprisingly gone up since Roger’s time, just shy of a fiver for use of the outdoor and indoor pools. Changed and ready, we marched over that foot-shredding hard plastic that all municipal pools seem to lay down for fear of swimmers slipping over.

  The heated water made it feel like high summer, the only suggestion of autumn coming when I wheeled my arms out during a front crawl and felt the freshness of the breeze on my hands. My crawl had slowly developed from a huffing breath-every-stroke kind of deal to something approaching respectability, with a quick swivel of the hips, a flick of the head skywards and a gulp of air every few metres. I liked the fact that the measured breathing gave me something to meditate on when I swam in a pool or lido, where I could see the bottom and the chances of enjoying the gabble of coots and swoops of kingfishers was non-existent, in contrast to some of the wilder spots I’d got used to swimming in. I was now reserving my preferred head-out breaststroke for ponds, rivers and bays, places where I wanted to observe nature and feel part of the scene.

  We swam forty lengths each, just over a kilometre thanks to the pool being 27.5 metres long, and retired to a pub across the road for a pint. There I wittered on at Joe about how many swims I was going to have to do, about how I was going to swim through the winter. I also blasted him with details about my next trip.

  This was to be to Roger’s favourite river, the Waveney. I was heading there with an old friend and swimming addict who wanted in on the action. When Joe heard I was going in mid-October he offered to lend me his wetsuit. I took him up on the rubbery offer. I cycled back through London, thinking of distant Suffolk fields, river water on my skin, thoughts of water keeping me calm as the traffic swelled around me.

  CHAPTER THREE

  October

  River Waveney, Suffolk/Norfolk border

  Yanny was waiting in his green Vauxhall people carrier in the car park at Beccles station.

  ‘Awright, Min,’ he said, grinning as he pulled himself free from the driver’s side and opened the boot. Used straw and a dull whiff of manure greeted me as I popped my head in and wrestled my backpack into the small amount of free space.

  ‘Sorry mate, Albie’s taken over a bit.’ Albie was a horse belonging to Yanny and his wife, Suz. They’d bought him for a cut price from some local travellers.

  It was clear just how much Albie had taken over when I got in. It was more like the back of a horse box than a car. There was straw everywhere. I pulled some from my jumper and threw it through the open window. Yanny took a swig from a can of Monster energy drink and looked in the rear-view mirror, where Amy, who had joined us for the day, had slid in next to a pile of riding gear.

  ‘Ain’t see either of you in ages,’ he said as we pulled off, heading for the Waveney.

  Before my swim in the Granta, Yanny and I had got talking on Facebook after I’d posted word about my latest swims on my personal page. The reaction had been positive and reaffirming, with many people sending me good wishes for the challenge ahead. Social media, that double-edged sword which often made me feel so lonely and useless, appeared to be helping my cause.

  Yanny told me he was keen to take me to Roger’s favourite places. He did, after all, live in the same part of Suffolk where Roger had lived for most of his life. As we exchanged public messages, we were joined by Amy. Amy is an old friend of a friend. We met when we were both wide-eyed young journalists, scribbling about average bands for crap money, looking for our big break in London. I hadn’t seen her for the best part of ten years.

  When Amy found out about my Waterlog plans she said she was keen to come along and would be down in England in mid-October, visiting friends an
d taking a break from her home in Orkney.

  It seemed like the perfect opportunity, not just to swim with others, but also get a guided tour from a bona fide local. Yanny and I had met at the University of East Anglia in 2000. A mature student, he had spiky, bleached hair, wore a padlock round his neck and performed poetry to big audiences. He was everything I wasn’t in those gawky early student days, but he was then, and is now, one of the most kind-hearted people I have ever met.

  These days he cultivated an air of Toad of Toad Hall. Not the smug manner, rather the tweed clobber, half-rim specs, the sense of a man at home in the country. He threw the car fast around corners, clearly with a good knowledge of the roads, regaling Amy and me with stories about the loaded landowners in these parts, interspersed with asides about the grinding rural poverty in this beautiful valley.

  We turned off and bumped along an unsealed road towards the Geldeston Locks Inn. It was here that Yanny and Suz had got married the previous summer and, handily, where Roger had launched off downstream for a radio documentary called ‘Cigarette on the Waveney’. The track was a mess of rocks and ruts, Yanny’s car not really cut out for the rough and tumble of this off-road adventure. He explained there was no point in sealing it. The track and surrounding fields flooded every winter.

  We parked the car and grabbed our things. It was a cool day, not yet into single figures, but definitely not warm enough to linger on the bank. Amy spotted the wetsuit in my bag and looked at it in surprise. Swimming in the sea in Orkney had hardened her to cold water. And besides, it was positively tropical here in eastern England compared to the islands she called home. But I was not to be deterred when it came to donning that neoprene. I wanted a swim that would last longer than thirty seconds.

  We walked through the beer garden, crossing a bridge over a riverside pool bound by nettles, passing through a kissing gate and on to the Waveney proper. A high bridge crosses the river here and we walked to the centre to get a better view of the marshlands that make up the Norfolk/Suffolk border. A row of poplars guarding the far bank hissed lightly in the autumn breeze. The river curved away to my right, while to my left the Big Dog ferry sat moored for the winter, having taken its last passengers from this isolated spot into Beccles a few weeks back.

  I told Yanny about Roger spotting an otter on his swim through this stretch of the Waveney in Waterlog. He said he knew of a holt – an otter’s nest – nearby, but grew coy when I asked if we could swim to it from here.

  ‘Another time,’ he said, as we ditched our bags. ‘It’s a secret.’

  Amy already had her swimsuit on under her clothes and was out of them quickly and into the water. On the journey up from London she had told me about her escapades with the Orkney Polar Bears, a wild-swimming club that took to the water every day of the year, no matter the weather. It made my dips in Highgate pond sound as tame as a splash in a puddle. Clearly these daily dips had given her the kind of imperviousness to water that the hidden Waveney otters enjoyed. Tall and graceful, she settled into a fast stroke, head above water, and swam back towards the locks, unfazed by the cold, her white blond hair conspicuous against the black of the autumnal river.

  Meanwhile I struggled awkwardly into the wetsuit Joe had lent me for the day. Yanny stood by, impressed by my James Bond-like get-up, still togged up in his winter coat. He wasn’t joining us today, his arthritis stranding him on dry land. His jute bag wasn’t laden with swimming stuff as I’d first thought, but spare towels and a flask of sweet instant coffee.

  I had no protection for my hands and feet, which whitened into numbness the minute I worked my way down the steep bank into the river. I was desperate to see an otter, but our splashing and noisy chat would surely have scared off this most elusive of creatures, even if it had been there in the first place. Instead, I had to make do with the icy water sliding over the top of my wetsuit and down my neck. I stifled a yelp as it reached my lumbar and thought of Roger sliding through these waters a mile at a time, a water creature in all but body, unencumbered by neoprene on a hot summer’s day.

  The poplars now bowing to the brisker wind, Yanny began to regale me from the bank with tales of the Waveney in summer. The dart of kingfishers as he and our old uni friends sat drinking cider on a nearby bench. The otter he’d seen while riding the Big Dog a few months ago. He told me how much he wanted to help me make my Waterlog trip happen and talked of other nearby spots we should visit once the weather was better: Benacre Broad, the River Bure near Aylsham, the sweeping sands of Holkham Bay. He said an old group of friends in Norwich, some of whom I hadn’t seen in years, were keen to join us. A wild-swimming gang was being formed on my behalf. I was elated.

  While we chatted, Yanny high up on the bridge as I floated on my back, Amy heaved herself clear on the far bank. Where boats and barges would normally moor for the day, she had managed to push herself up and straddle a leg onto the top of a corrugated metal retaining wall. This kind of feat would have left me breathless, but Amy smiled and glowed red as the blood rushed back to her limbs after ten minutes in the Waveney. She made her way back to our bench, drying and changing quickly, not a sign of a shiver as she wrapped a large scarf around her shoulders.

  I followed suit, albeit in more ungainly fashion. I opted to get out where I’d got in. The bank, though, seemed far steeper than before. I stood on tip toes, my feet like solid blocks of ice on the muddy riverbed, and tried to swing my left leg up. No joy. A huge bed of stinging nettles impeded me to the right.

  Instead, I leant forward to grab two clumps of grass. Nibbled to near nothingness by cattle and withered by the onset of autumn, they barely took my weight. My palms stained green as I slipped back into the river. Roger hardly ever mentioned getting out. Where was the romance and poetry in falling backwards, arms whirring for balance, into a stretch of water you’d just communed with?

  I stood up and assessed my options. I stretched out my arms and tried to pull myself clear, feeling Amy’s hand take one arm and Yanny take the other. Anyone walking across the bridge from the Locks would have seen a man clad in black neoprene lying prone on the riverbank as if he’d just been on a failed police dive, two strangers pulling him clear.

  My hands were caked in slick mud, the front of the wetsuit streaked with wet grass, its knees a shitty brown as I got unsteadily to my feet. Wild swimming can be many things, but glamorous is certainly not one of them.

  I unzipped and opened the tight suit, my chest pimpled but dry, the only sensation of cold coming from the light breeze off the marshes. I sat drinking Yanny’s coffee as I proceeded to make a meal of getting my legs free, the wetsuit glued around my ankles. Yanny offered to pull me out. But I had visions of him falling and going for a dip that he hadn’t planned on. With great difficulty I freed myself and stuffed the rolled-up, smelly mass of neoprene into a plastic recycling bag. I needed a pint and something hearty to restore my pride after spending more time getting out and getting dry than actually swimming in Roger’s favourite river. We decamped to the warmth of the bar, hot soup already waiting, a local ale being poured as I collapsed onto a bench. This had been just the type of mildly hapless and enjoyable adventure I’d hoped for when I decided to follow in Roger’s footsteps.

  Later that afternoon, as an autumn shower settled over the Waveney Valley, Yanny and Amy dropped me back at Beccles station. The greyness of the day cut through me and the last of my post-swim high dissipated as I gave them a final wave from the chugging, two-carriage train. A tattered copy of that morning’s Metro lay on the seat next to me, decrying Obama’s performances in the recent presidential debates. The future of the Western world was on a knife edge.

  I had swum in Roger’s favourite river, but a nagging sense of failure crept into my mind as I stared out over ploughed fields, rooks picking over the final, churned-up treats of autumn before retreating to branches barely visible in the fading light. I had thought I would do more than this, have seen more of Roger’s world than this, before the weather turned and m
ade swimming outdoors less of a joy and more of a chore.

  I realised that this would likely be my last swim of the year. I had no others planned and the days were drawing in. And with that I had to face up to the idea of not having the water as my crutch, my Band-Aid, the thing I needed to make myself better. I was facing a long wait until I could soak my skin without a wetsuit, feel the soaring high of a dopamine rush and the long happy burn I felt after a lengthy dip.

  I castigated myself for being so pathetic as I got off the train at Liverpool Street, trying to remember the flow of the Waveney at my back.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  February

  River Windrush, Oxfordshire

  Winter came on raw, and with the cold my willingness to swim diminished. I struggled to imagine days when I’d be able to take multiple swims and fulfil my Waterlog wish.

  Instead, I sat in and reread Roger’s words about places far from south London. His trip to Jura was foremost in my mind. I dreamt of days when the sun rose at four and set after eleven, of camping to the sound of deer groaning among the rough, hilly grass. I knew I wanted to make a trip to that Scottish island the culmination of the coming summer’s swims, perhaps of my journey as a whole.

  For now though, Scotland would have to wait. The shortest days of the year came and went and I realised how much I missed swimming in Roger’s wake, the possibilities it opened up, the curative properties, the fact it had offered respite from feeling down on myself. I realised too that I took some small joy from the planning of it all too. Once again I had spent winter working alone in the flat, worrying and feeling constantly het up.

  Opening my spreadsheet, looking at the plans I’d scribbled down and pinned to my office wall, offered me a way out of that low, a chance to imagine being outside and basking in nature. The plans didn’t stress me out at that point, but spoke to me of a year of swimming my way towards a state of calm. Such thoughts urged me on and gave me a renewed impetus even as winter’s grey skies failed to relent.