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August 03, 2005

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April 19, 2005

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The current mood of aliwalidoodah at www.imood.com

September 13, 2004 - 8:55 pm

H20

In July this year Mr D and I packed up my mum and dad�s old orange and brown frame tent and drove to Cornwall to make camp for a week on a hillside by the sea (in the hope that the other campers would think us retro rather than out-of-date in our 1970s relic of a tent). We had been married seven months at that time and we were full of ideas for future schemes and holidays to start planning together, looking forward to together, doing together.

We stopped on the seafront one day eating ice cream by the pier. From over the wall we could look out across a long expanse of water towards a distant beach in a part of Cornwall further up the coast, we could just make out the little people getting sunburnt and screaming at their kids. Then slowly we could make out the rythmatic strokes and bobbing head of a swimmer front-crawling his way across the gulf of water. He had left the distant beach at some point before our arrival and was now fast approaching the pier wall.

Delighted to have some free entertainment while we polished off our ice-creams we stayed to watch him finally make contact with the pier wall and look back at the distance he had swum. He stopped he looked back, caught his breath for a few minutes, then turned around and started the long swim back.

It was a ridiculous past time to undertake. Ploughing through the freezing Cornish waters with all the flotsom and jetsum swirling around him and sea water stinging his eyes and throat and swelling his tongue. The moment I saw him I wanted to do it too. I wanted that feeling of looking back on my achievement with aching arms and shortness of breath.

Three months later Mr D and I are going to do it, but more so. We have booked a holiday for next year to go to the Greek Cyclades and island-hop between various islands using just the sea that joins them and our own physical and mental strength. The longest swim we will undertake will be 5.5 kilometres between Paros and Naxos (that�s about three and a half miles) and the trip is organised by a company that runs open water swimming holidays. There will be a boat and people on hand to ensure safety but the rest of the time it�ll be us and the open water. No lines on the bottom of a clear calm pool, no stopping every two or three lengths to adjust goggles and catch breath. Just one expanse of unpredictable salt water filled with fish and other things that I don�t want to start considering.

Here�s something that sums up my personal reasons for doing this�from �Waterlog� by Roger Deakin:

��swimming is a rite of passage, a crossing of boundaries: the line of the shore, the bank of the river, the edge of the pool, the surface itself. 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. The lifeguards at the pool or the beach remind you of the thin line between waving and drowning. You see and experience things when you're swimming in a way that is completely different from any other. 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. In wild water you are on equal terms with the animal world around you: in every sense, on the same level. As a swimmer, I can go right up to a frog in the water and it will show more curiosity than fear. The damselflies and dragonflies that crowd the surface of the moat pointedly ignore me, just taking off for a moment to allow me to go by, then landing again in my wake.�

I have been a swimmer since as long as I remember, learning to swim amongst the jellyfish off the French coast and in the choppy waters of our local pool on lessons night, right through to university where I qualified as a lifeguard. But I haven�t swum for qualification or fitness in over five years, except for holidays and honeymoons ploughing through the sea with a snorkel or to catch the next wave on a body board. I am even having to teach myself how to do front crawl correctly again, without gasping in a lungful of water every third stroke. I�m getting there, and it�ll be worth it in the end when I am sitting breathless on a Greek shore staring back at a distant island in the fading daylight and thinking �I did that�.

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