The idea for this blog came to me whilst breast-stroking up and down my friend's pool (the one in photos in another post) - condensation dripping onto my nose from the plastic roof, my goggles making frightening white marks in the skin around my eyes.
I wanted to keep a record of my swimming experiences and more importantly, write my thoughts and feelings around them. A few weeks before, I'd decided (this time in the slow lane of Hove's King Alfred Centre pool) to write a memoir about my mother, told through my love for swimming. Though this has changed a little recently, it struck me that by keeping a swimming blog, I could keep ideas for the book bubbling away. Also, frankly, it would be pleasurable to write.
I wanted to keep a record of my swimming experiences and more importantly, write my thoughts and feelings around them. A few weeks before, I'd decided (this time in the slow lane of Hove's King Alfred Centre pool) to write a memoir about my mother, told through my love for swimming. Though this has changed a little recently, it struck me that by keeping a swimming blog, I could keep ideas for the book bubbling away. Also, frankly, it would be pleasurable to write.
Though as a child I loved swimming, spending countless holidays running in and out of the sea, jumping off concrete into emerald pools and rolling in sand on foreign beaches, between the ages of fifteen and thirty-three I swam only two or three times, tops. Yet only weeks after Mum's final stroke, in that hot traumatic summer of '06, I found myself regularly splashing about in the sea off the coast of Brighton.
I love swimming in wild places – lakes and rivers – but I also love the tang of chlorine and rubber flip flops in the air at swimming pools. I like simply being near water - on cliff tops, peering over the edge to the drop below. However, my favourite place to be is the sea. Nowhere calms and exhilarates me as sea-swimming does. There is no high like that of breast-stroking towards an infinite horizon. I fantasise of one day swimming the Channel.
So I want you to come with me as I delve deeper into myths and dreams of the sea, of swimming and of swimmers, and as I explore new swimming holes, and marvel at the creatures under the water we so rarely pay attention to.
So I want you to come with me as I delve deeper into myths and dreams of the sea, of swimming and of swimmers, and as I explore new swimming holes, and marvel at the creatures under the water we so rarely pay attention to.
We all deal with grief differently, but I never expected swimming to have such soul-soothing powers. These days I believe in the redemptive power of water (after all we use it to bless and baptise). Though I do like swimming out to where the water is deep, I don't have a death wish. In fact I have a life wish. Putting it simply, I love being in water. I'd like to share this love with you.
Photo: courtesy Bob Dickinson
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