We know it's toxic, but the animals don't eat it.

Monday 27th July 2009

"Film character busters!! Put Paul McCartney in a blender and drink what comes out: B"

We waited in silence.

"Beetlejuice!!" Brother the elder roared triumphantly, answering his own unique brand of brain-teaser as we ate our breakfast.

So here I am, still in Devon with the family. After the last wild swim, we had to find more. The previous one was my first, and already, I was hooked...

We drove out onto Dartmoor, to a little stone bridge over the river Teign, near Castle Drogo, the last castle to be built in Britain. It was built for a merchant millionaire named Julius Drewe, who is often described as eccentric, and who gave himself the title Baron Drogo de Teigne. In the stretch of river below the castle, he built a series of artificial salmon leaps, consisting of three square pools cascading one into another, forming a long, calm pool above the leaps, from which salmon can be fished, and a divinely chaotic, natural river system surrounded by lush green forest below. This is why we were here.

We parked up, went through the gate on the other side of the road, and followed the public footpath alongside the river. As we walked, the sun came out and started to blaze away in a sky rapidly emptying of clouds, and when we entered the forest, the sunlight dappling through the canopy onto the river created a wonderful, mesmerising myriad of hues. When we found the leaps, we set up camp (not literally), and I found an enormous rock downstream of the leaps, behind which I changed into my swimming shorts. I wondered whether the rock was the same one mentioned in the Wild Swimming book as "the rocking Logan Stone thought to belong to the druids".

I joined both brothers back at the leaps, where we got in the water at the calm pool above the leaps, with, shall we say, varying degrees of ease. I'll mention no names (In an unrelated topic, however, one family camping holiday in France, years ago, the campsite had a big swimming pool with a chute. My younger brother was terrified, and so didn't go down the chute, until, as he had decided quite early on, the very last day we were there. After finally trying the chute, he wanted to stay for two more weeks, and so regretted leaving the experience to the very last day).

Anyway, the river water in the top pool was, it has to be said, quite brisk, but absolutely rejuvenating! The water was dark, and tinged red, and I immersed myself, once again feeling the epochal, instinctive, evolutionary urge to submerge and resultant exultant feeling; an evolutionary ecstasy! We also annoyed a Fly fisherman.

Dad asked him "Do you catch much salmon in here?"

"Try to." Came the grumbled reply, with a perturbed glance in our direction.

I'm not saying for certain whether or not what happened next was loaded with malicious intent, but this is what happened: His fly and hook landed and got tangled up in the vegetation on the bank, dangerously close to where we were swimming. We offered to detach it. "No, it's ok." came the grumbled reply. I might have imagined it, but there seemed to be a slight air of I-would've-gotten-away-with-it-too-if-it-wasn't-for-you-pesky-kids in his demeanour.

Anyway, the leaps!! Swimming, or rather falling, down them, feet first, is fun, and going underwater in there gives you a natural high, the unconscious forces roaring around your head, pummeling your muscles. Even those, I noticed, used to keep you standing upright, which don't normally move around much other than in the directions they naturally act. But sheer elemental forces oscillate and pummel, and violently massage your whole being...Absolutely epic!! I plunged my face into the falling water, and the roar-hum I heard under there (I could breathe in the pocket of air behind the water) was absolutely unique. I was reminded of a quote from the C.S Lewis book "Out of the silent planet". A Malacandrian life-form named Hyoi the Hross says to the protagonist:

"There I drank life, because death was in the pool. That was the best of drinks."

What I shouted to my brothers before this, though, was slightly less profound.

"Remember what the 7UP can said!! Life's a blast when you dive right in!"

The exit from the lowest of the three pools is a concrete slide, the effect of which combines with the concentrated forces of the river to thrust you downstream like a champagne cork, tumbling over boulders and logs and stones. I sustained a few bumps and cuts and bruises!! Also, I bumped my head on the concrete bottom of the top pool when I went down it whilst sitting in an inflatable rubber ring. I threw the ring into the next pool, and it fell down into the river below, so I tumbled down the cascades to save it. I finally grabbed it, jumped in it and sailed downstream, away from the water's roar, to bathe in the green light and the quiet tinkling of the calmer river and symphonic birdsong. "Are you doing a summer of extreme sports or something?" asked one of the young lads who watched me and ran after me down the river. I explained as effectively as I could while being carried down a river, and they wondered aloud to each other: "Why didn't we come here to do this?!"

Why indeed? Exhilarated, refreshed, we wandered back past wildflower meadows and fields of cows, in the golden Dartmoor sunshine, to get some much needed lunch.

Is this West Indian Lilac?

Wow!! It's been a long time! We have much to discuss, old friends! Since the last entry, a lot has changed. Many swimming-related events have taken place, and it is now less than a week until Seb and I part ways for the best part of a year:

"Flotsam and Jetsam shall be carried wherever the current takes them, but always on the same ocean they shall remain." - Confucius*

I went to Devon on holiday for 2 weeks in the summer with my family. We have been doing so for the last seven summers, to the same place, where we meet up with friends. It is unfailingly the most fun-packed fortnight of the year. My brother has recently bought a superb book named "Wild Swimming" by Daniel Start, which lists places to swim in rivers, lakes, tarns and waterfalls across the UK. I went on my first wild swim at a stop in Somerset on our way down to Devon. This is what it was like:

Friday 24th July 2009

I had a dream in the night that I was on a ship/ferry on a beautiful sunny day, on which there was a big tank of water, something like a swimming pool, and some people were introducing us to whales and sharks swimming around in it - spectacular, it was! I sat on the side railing of the boat-like vessel, and a fella who was very strong and muscly (who looked afraid of nothing and bore a passing resemblance to my old friend, one Mr Burly McRepface) said something to the effect of "I'll swim however long I want in any swimming pool, anywhere in the world, but ask me to go in there," he motioned towards the sea surrounding us. "And I just won't. Ever." I can't remember exactly what happened then, but I dived either into the big pool or into the sea, and in the distance swam a giant Blue Whale, with its beautiful calf, which was a shimmering white for some reason.

Then I woke up, and thought to myself that the muscly guy represented me in my mind, and my latent fear of swimming over unknown habitats. Anything could be down there! Also, that I need to see a Blue Whale before I die, but anyway, later today, it turned out , I confronted my fear of the unknown when we stopped at Castle Carey, near Lydford on Fosse in Somerset, in the pouring rain. My brothers and I explored the churchyard of St Peter's church, its luscious green grass and brown river, edged by willows and wildflowers. We sheltered under the dense dark foliage of an ancient Yew, then, after getting ready (in both body and mind), I clambered into the river from the bank, watched by an old couple down here for their holiday. "Do you mind if we take photos?" they asked us. We told them we didn't mind. It must be nice to be in some anonymous photo album somewhere, after all.

The water was quite brown, visibility less than 1 foot, due to the recent rains, according to the Environment agency people who turned up later, simply to watch us frolick (not to tell us off, as we initially thought). We swam under the bridge, pretending we were pirates and jumped from the top of it into the water as well!!! It was so much fun!! My brothers joined me in the river, and we revelled in the beauty of the natural world. "Immersion is sublime!!!" I shouted to my parents on the bank as I surface-dived to the bottom of the River Brue. The sporadic, though quite heavy rains added to the natural, primordial, adventurous atmosphere as we explored the river, and repeatedly clambered out to jump from the bridge, using thick roots to pull ourselves out, epic adventure style!!

"This is my first wild swim, and my favourite!" I said, fairly unnecessarily. "It's like Zelda!!" I went on to observe.

"Yeah, when you go under the bridge at Lake Hylia to get the jar!!" said Brother the Elder.

We swam down the river, comparing the experience to Coral Island, The Wind in the Willows and The Odyssey (Starring Armand Assante). We climbed out at the weir, and we (the whole family) walked through the churchyard and across another bridge. Younger Bro and I picked 5 apples from the orchard there, when the rain poured down again, as we revelled in our bare-footed adventure, making us feel like our long distant hunter-gatherer ancestors. We changed back into our clothes in the church porch.

What an adventure!! My first wild swim made me feel so alive, so refreshed, and so spiritually enriched!! Hopefully the first of many!!!

*Legal Disclaimer: My little Confucius, there's no place like Ponyland!!

The lack of humility before nature that's being displayed here, uh... staggers me.

65 million years ago, a great change happened. One of the greatest mass extinction events ever to take place in the 4 billion year-long history of our planet. The biggest reptiles ever to have lived were killed in a geological instant, after a reign of hundreds of millions of years, allowing the tiny proto-primates to emerge from their hideaway niches in the ground cover and canopy, and start breeding, free from the predators in whose shadows they had survived for aeons.

Then for a long while, everything plodded along nicely.

Until Thursday 2nd July 2009.

A distant descendant of one of these proto-primates walked, with his easy-going buddy, Seb, into a leisure centre in Essex. They both paid their money, and went through. After donning their super hi-tech swimming gear (which, incidentally, was the pinnacle of technology. From the moment the first Ape-like creature, itself a descendant of the aforementioned proto-primates, used a stone tool to crack open a palm nut, each subsequent development in insight and imagination had been leading up to the day the first Speedo Aquablade Hydroshorts went on sale; the day of the ultimate Eureka), they entered the pool area. Seb hopped in the shallow end, as always, and Tom (for it was he) headed up to the deep end, as usual, in order to dive back into the elemental pond from which his long-distant ancestors first crawled. His path was blocked by two distant granddaughters of the the tiny mammal that outlived the dinosaurs. He saw them as Homo sapiens sapiens lifeguardii.

"No diving anymore, mate" said one of them.

Tom was stunned. "Wha- Why not?!" he spluttered, undoing hundreds of thousands of years of the cultural evolution that led to humankind's perfection of verbal communication.

"They've just had a review of the regulations, and now the minimum depth for diving is 2.5 metres, and not 2 metres, like before." she explained concisely.

And so it was, my friends (for now I will stop writing in the third person), that I had to crawl into the shallow end like a primitive tetrapod fish-like creature who, after using his swim bladder as a makeshift lung for a few days, thought that perhaps life on land wasn't for him after all.

I realised after my swim that, even though the influence of exercise-induced endorphins was lifting my mood, it was not to such a great extent as it had been before, when the sudden plunge from air to water would hit me like a delicious drug-fuelled delirium.

Another thing that made this swim one of the least fulfilling, was the very large man I shared a lane with, whose sheer mass would displace the water to such an extent every time we passed each other, that I almost drowned many times. This human wave-machine made sure I had my five portions of Chlorinated water that doctors don't recommend*.

Seb and I lolled off after the swim, to the local park, where we sat on the swastika-decorated swings, and watched the sun sink out of a clear summer sky as we wallowed in self pity.

*Now I've gone insane.

Anybody hear that? It’s an .... it’s an impact tremor, that’s what it is ...

I know, I know - eighteen weeks ago I promised fortnightly blog updates. But you know what it's like when you're young and in swimming trunks: the whole world becomes a playground that conspires to keep you away.

... So, ahem, where were we?

Regular visitors to the blog (yes, I'm looking at you googlebot) are undoubtedly still mourning the postponement of our swim adventure for 2009. As Tom revealed exclusively last week, a number of quite foreseeable real-world events have interposed themselves on our planning, and, as a consequence, there will be no Swim for Glory until 2011 at the earliest.

Now, before you lament the general unfairness of the universe and return to the fetal position under the kitchen table that you've been assuming ever since you heard the news, I actually have some good news - of sorts - to help you through this troubling period.

In what is perhaps best described as an act of pure self-indulgence, Tom and I have decided to keep the blog going, and promise to update it with greater regularity (not too difficult) and even better content (careful now).

So, if the thought of another two years of us blogging doesn't fill your heart with unbridled joy and glee, you, sir, are quite clearly a robot, incapable of experiencing human emotions or possessing a navel.

Now, before you hasten to agree with that assessment, I must confess that I don't have any humorous swim-related anecdotes to share with you this week, as, in more robot-related news, Tom and I abandoned our training in favour of catching the latest Terminator film.

But I'm sure there will be an actual update here. Eventually.

Creation is an act of sheer will. Next time it'll be flawless.

Hello from the future!!!

Apologies to all (four of you) for the long delay in updating the blog. You know how it is, with all things being equal and all that.

In all the time since our last post, we have had two guest swimmers: the first was Mike. Remember him? From way back in the beginning when hope and glory glazed our eyeballs and Aquablade Hydroshorts technology was yet to be experienced (the drag ages). Inevitably, he contributed enthusiastically to our fun and games, and even invented a new stroke! Well, not a stroke as such, more a kind of bounce through the water standing upright with his hands by his sides. I gave it a test run too, the combined results of which being my relief to return to a more normal stroke*, and the swift disappearance of Seb to an area of the pool where people behave in a more conventional manner. Our underwater charades also benefited in no significant way from the presence of an extra brain.

Our second guest swimmer was a colleague of mine, the perennially belligerent but fun-loving Shezza McBezza (Not her real name). I mentioned to her one day that Seb and I go swimming every Wednesday, and she jumped at the chance to join us.

She hadn't read the blog before.

Needless to say we had a lane to ourselves for the greater part of the evening. I saw Burly McRepface again tonight, but felt disinclined to reintroduce myself amidst the relative rowdiness emanating from our lane. Suffice it to say the peaceful world under the surface became a quiet haven of tranquillity, into which I could plunge to escape the decibels and dumbells. Besides, Burly and I would have little to discuss. After all, I know now what kind of reps he does.

On our most recent swim, Seb and I stepped it up a notch. Only a small notch, mind. I outlined my plans soon after we dived in. "I'm going to do 40, and then we can talk about our emotions." Seb's mouth shrank and stretched silently into his characteristic jovial smirk. I pushed off from the side, thinking that he must save that expression for when he finds something I say slightly strange. After finally completing a kilometre for the first time in a long time, I floated on a metaphorical lilo of endorphin-induced contentment down to the shallow end where we rewarded ourselves by lounging around, talking about our emotions. Half an hour later, a woman in the lane next to us stopped and said to us "You say us women can talk! You two have been standing around here for half an hour chatting away, and my other half is over there chinwagging as well!!"

"Hahahaha, yeah!" we both replied in ullulating unison, a joint vocalisation with the main aim of punctuating the exchange with a full stop. Sure enough, she swam away, and now we both felt obliged to swim. Seb went first, and as the woman returned to the shallow end, where I still sat, I, for some reason, engaged her again. Maybe I subconsciously wanted to explain our unmanly behaviour. "It's a good alternative to going to the pub to talk all the time!!" I said, cheerily.

"Hahahaha, yeah!" she laughed. "Cheaper too!! And you're surrounded by fluid!!"

"Hahahaha, yeah!" I recited, quickly.

We never spoke again. I imagined Burly McRepface phoning up one of his athletic, muscular mates, and saying "Alrigh' Steve? Fancy getting surrounded by fluid tonight? Yeah? I'll meet you in the pub at 8!"

But anyway. An important announcement follows: Initially, Seb and I had planned to book a swimtrek adventure for this summer, 2009. However, both our circumstances have now changed, and we are both off to University again this Autumn to do a Masters course. Separate ones, mind. I've been using that turn of phrase quite a bit, haven't I? The comma followed by the word mind. Anyway, it is for this reason that we haven't been able to book the adventure for this year, and that we are now officially announcing the temporary postponement of our Swim for Glory. Both of our courses run until September 2010, so the earliest we will be able to do it is summer 2011. It's a long time, I know, but just think of it like this: Blackfriars underground station will probably still be closed by the time we have reorganised our adventure. We will still occasionally blog every now and then, but once we have regrouped and got everything booked and ready to go, we will no doubt get in touch with you all and more of you, to make the most out of our adventure for everyone involved: The as yet unchosen charity, us, and you. So we thank you sincerely for reading the blog, or for just looking at the page and not bothering to read it, so we can get pleasure out of watching our counter increase every time (simple things).

So I'm not saying that a group composed entirely of female animals will...breed, I'm just saying that life...uh...finds a way.


*E.g. the Tugboat Tom stroke, which involves lying back in the water, with my toes breaking the surface, and using my arms to propel me in the direction my legs are pointing, hence the "Tugboat" of the title.

Dinosaurs, uh, *had* their shot, and nature *selected* them for extinction!

There should have been music playing.

Have you ever had one of those moments that seems so perfectly suited to the emotional music in particularly heart-rending scenes in Hollywood movies? Well, as Seb's face disappeared from view as I closed the front door to his house, a light, tinkly, minor key piano soundtrack was the only thing missing from the scene.

You see, this weekend, Seb and I are off to Barcelona, with Mike, the fellow mentioned early in this blog, to celebrate Mike's birthday. Seb has a lot of work to be done on an essay due in before we leave the country, for his University course. This is the reason he couldn't afford to take time out this week for our swim, and therefore the reason I went swimming all on my own. I had dropped in at his house before I went to the pool, to sort out flight details and payment, etc. Mundane stuff, but it happened to produce an oscar worthy farewell scene. Well, sort of.

With Seb temporarily out of the picture, I could, if I was so inclined, write anything I wanted in this week's blog, with nobody to deny what went on. However, I am the sort of person to stick to the truth, as I would feel not only as if I am cheating you, the reader, but also myself.

"Hmm....'Attractive Female Swimwear Models' night'" I read on the entrance to the leisure centre door as I went in. "That's not something you see everyday"

I realised I was reading aloud, and I was overheard by a group of 5 or 6 attractive female swimwear models.
"Have you never been to an AFSM night before?" the most attractive of them asked.
"No." I answered, plausibly.
"Don't worry," they attractively chimed, in unison, "We'll make you feel at home..."

Ahem. In all honesty, it didn't happen much like this at all. In fact, the pool was crowded, and I was a little too fast for the users of the slow lane, and a little too slow for the users of the fast lane. Yes indeed, I fell victim to what those in the know call "Two-lane frustration". I completed 60 lengths eventually, and by the time I had, at around 8:40PM, most of the swimmers had paired off and settled in the shallows to chat amongst themselves. It was the first time I had been swimming without Seb in about 5 months. It was different. The pool used to seem a lot more blue, I mused sadly, with Seb's cheerful face bobbing around in it. Still, now the lanes were empty, so I warmed down, silently, for half an hour.

One thing that did come of tonight's swim was yet another new swimming style (We seem to invent a new one weekly). I would swim from the deep end to the shallow end, and, as I approached the end of the pool, I would dive underwater and swim using only breast stroke kicks while extending my arms in front of me, with my hands never breaking contact with the bottom of the pool. I called it "The Bottom Feeder Stroke", and it did amuse me for a while. But when I had surfaced and there was nobody there with whom to share my new discovery, I sighed. My mind returned to an article I had read about swimming in the week:

Does swimming make you fat?

If you are exercising to lose weight, choose your sport carefully. New research shows that certain forms of exercise cause participants to feel more hungry than others - with the result that any calories lost are likely to be quickly replaced. Swimming in cold water, for instance, tends to make people crave high-fat foods such as biscuits, while mid- to low-intensity exercise such as walking has no impact on appetite. Meanwhile, running on a hot day actually suppresses hunger. The findings, said Dr David Stensel of Loughborough University, who led the research, are related to the production of the appetite hormone ghrelin, which is suppressed by running and stimulated by swimming. "The body tends to respond to exercise so it can do it more efficiently in future," said Dr Stensel. Runners perform better if they have a low body weight, he explained, whereas people who swim in cold water would benefit from protective fat.

With that in mind, I heaved myself out of the pool, feeling a combination of the natural endorphin-induced elation that comes from exercise, a sense of loneliness in the absence of my swim buddy, and that delicious hunger that seems to affect every cell in your body, that only comes from swimming. I bade farewell to the Attractive Female Swimwear Models, and drove home to get a biscuit.

At home, I texted Seb and told him swimming was lonely without him.

Seb 12-Mar-2009
00:39:10
Wasn't your new swimming buddy, Burly McRepface, there? Or how about Jiggling Joe the Jogger?

Somewhere on this island is the greatest predator there ever lived. The second greatest predator must take him down.

Hello again!! Sorry for the delay. Please make a note of the location of the emergency exits and the Swim for Glory blog will be with you shortly.



So, after the longest break from swimming we have had since we started the blog back in 1927 in the shady corner of a Guatemalan flag weaver's kitchen, we were more than ready for some chlorinated fun. Upon returning from China, getting back to work, and taking weeks to recover fully from my jetlag, I was much in need of getting the blood pumping through my veins. Four whole weeks without swimming left me feeling somewhat desolate.



Sure enough, when I finally dived into the pool, the bulk of the negative perspective in my mind fell out of my brain, like when you tip up a recently opened yoghurt pot full of past-its-use-by-date yoghurt onto the kitchen table. As I swam my worries away, the remnants of negativity were scraped out of my mind with every endorphin-inducing exhalation, much like when you scrape the rest of the old yoghurt (that which didn't fall out onto the kitchen table initially) out of the pot with a spoon or modified stick.



Yoghurt metaphors aside (even those to which everyone can relate), after the swim, I felt on top of the world. As such, it was not hard to believe the conclusion scientists have recently arrived at - That swimming makes you live longer. I read the following article in the paper on the underground back home from Heathrow:



"WATER SPORT

Swimming lengths in a pool can be a real chore but it could help you live longer. In fact, it is more effective at extending your life than any other sport. Going for a daily dip could add up to five years to your life, a study found. The medical histories of 40, 000 men aged between 20 and 90 over 32 years were examined in the US research. Swimmers had a 53 per cent lower mortality risk than those who exercised by walking or running."



So, the following week (Wednesday 25th February 2009), I was more than happy to get back into the old routine of a weekly swim, safe in the knowledge that Seb and I were adding roughly 260.85714 days each to our lifespans (Including leap days). "What are you going to do today?" I asked Seb as we approached the leisure centre. "Hmmm.....I think I might do a bit of swimming".

Too right.



Seb had casually mentioned to me previously that swimming lengths in a pool is perhaps one of the most antisocial pastimes, referring to the fact that although friends who go swimming together chat to each other between, and sometimes during, lengths, the swimming pool is not the first place you think of when making new friends comes to mind. So, after collecting our entry cards for the pool ("Oh! They're green today!" I remarked as I turned mine over to see "Splash Time" scrawled over mine in a hurried hand with permanent marker. Seb found this very funny, and was was even more amused that this apparently juvenile signature was confined to my card.), and swimming a kilometre and a half, I decided to challenge this theory.



I sat in the shallow end, stretching and flexing my pleasantly burning calf muscles underwater, as a Barrell-chested behemoth approached in my lane. He stopped and stood there, turning occasionally to watch the clock, apparently timing his breaks.



"What sort of reps are you doing?" I asked him in what I deemed to be an offhand kind of way. I thought this would be the perfect way to break the ice, to ask him about the exercise he was engaging in. After all, that big muscled lobster from Spongebob Squarepants likes to talk about little else than weightlifting.

"20 lengths" he said.

"Oh!" I deftly countered, involuntarily conveying a non-existent fascination with his reply.

"And...." I was thinking aloud now. "What breaks do you take?"

"One or two minutes. Whenever I'm ready, really."

I did that laugh you do to punctuate polite but uninspiring conversation. "Are you training for anything?"

"Me and those two blokes over there....the one swimming towards us and the one swimming away... are training for a triathlon. Well, three triathlons, really."

It was at this point that I noticed I was still sitting down in the water, and he was standing there, about 8 foot tall, our different resting positions accentuating the height difference.

"Have you heard of swimtrek?"

"Yeah."

I was taken aback. I don't meet too many people who have heard of it. "We're training for one of those trips. We're going to swim from Greek island to Greek island. Do you know anyone who's been on a swimtrek holiday?"

"Nah, you just hear of these things, don't yer?"

"Well good luck with the triathlons!" I said.

"Those two keep taking the p*** out of me, cos I'm a bit older than them. My missus does as well. She keeps taking the p*** out of me!!"

I laughed, more appropriately this time.

"I'm sure you show them up, experience over youth an' all that!"

"Yeah!" he laughed, and we bade each other a fond farewell.

I swam out of the lane to the free swimming part of the pool, and waited at the shallow end in line with Seb's swimming trajectory, eager to tell him about my new friend. Seb altered his course on seeing me, and swam away from where I was sitting. What a joker!

"How did you start the conversation?" Seb asked, when I finally tracked him down.

"I said 'how many reps are you doing?'"

Seb's pleasant, open face silently yet ineffectively concealed his laughter.

"And he still spoke to you?!"

We laughed heartily, in a manner befitting the end of a Thundercats episode or a blog entry, then talked about Streetfighter 2 and the 5 famous people we'd each invite to a dinner party for about half an hour while we warmed down.

Moral of the story: Feeling down? Go for a swim.