whatcathyread

During the COVID lockdown, with all swimming pools shut like many others I took to the sea.  I didn’t have to go far: only a few miles along the coast from my home there is a lovely, sheltered bay. Immersion was gloriously cold and exhilarating, and I loved it…but having a healthy respect for tides, currents, and low water-temperature, I rarely had a ‘proper’ swim, even when I was in the water for twenty minutes or more; so when the swimming pools re-opened I took to the sea less and less. At the time of writing it’s been over a year since I swam in my beautiful bay.

Others, though, have continued their wild swimming journey. My friend, Sara, for instance, plans to swim in fifty-five different wild swimming spots this year to celebrate her birthday year.  No coincidence, then, that it was Sara who suggested Waterlog and loaned me her copy.

The premise is straightforward enough. Deacon, wanting to “break out of the frustration of a lifetime doing lengths”, sets off on a swimming journey through Britain, starting in the Scilly Isles. Actually, that’s not strictly true. Deacon’s journey “would begin and end in my moat”. Before setting off he’s “measured for a tailor-made suit” from a “wetsuit couturier”. A moat? A made-to-measure wetsuit? Only eight pages into Waterlog it’s clear whoever Deacon is, he’s certainly not Everyman.

Except, in a sense, he is. Water is a great leveller. “When you enter the water…you go through the looking glass surface and enter a new world, in which survival, not ambition or desire, is the dominant aim.” Deacon might be a stronger swimmer than me but we both seem to be on the same page about “the terror and the bliss” of plunging into deep water.

Arguably the most powerful chapter of the book is the swim Deacon chooses not to undertake. Visiting the Hebridean island of Jura, intending to swim to across the Gulf of Corryvreckan to Scarba, Deacon stands by the shore, sees “whirlpool…turbulence” and realises attempting the swim would be “madness…suicidal”. Another day, maybe.

And I did enjoy his account of swimming in the open-air pool at Oasis Sports Centre in Convent Garden, if only because I’d once swum there myself during a work trip to London. “Floating on my back in the pool, and looking up, I saw the balconies of council flats and bright offices lit up with people at computers in the windows, and, up above, a black starry sky.”

Deacon’s journey was inspired by John Cheever’s short story The Swimmer (made into a film starring Burt Lancaster) where the hero decides to swim home from a party via a series of his neighbours’ swimming pools. From that I understood Deacon was planning a systematic series of swims around or across Britain but no, he misses out swathes of the country.

Near the end of the book – Chapter 32 of 36 – Deacon says “he had never set out to make this a comprehensive tour”. It might have been better to explain this in Chapter 1. As it was, I felt short-changed on what I thought the blurb and the opening page had promised. Even if you love swimming as much as I do, it doesn’t necessarily follow you’ll love reading ABOUT swimming. Without an overarching plan (to swim from Land End to John O Groats, say) Waterlog becomes a selection of swimming anecdotes.

True, Deacon provides some historical background and other information about the places he visits, but still…

Perhaps it’s a book you’re better dipping into (pun intended) rather than reading cover to cover. Or perhaps it’s simply a hard genre to crack. The great Samuel Johnson certainty thought so: “few books disappoint their readers more than the narrations of travellers…when the volume is opened, nothing is found but such general accounts as leave no distinct idea behind them, or such minute enumerations as few can read with either profit or delight.”~  Ouch!

Rating: * Worth a try (but not for me)

~from ‘Narratives of Travellers Considered’ in The Idler, No 97, 23 February 1760