Watery Bodies

I don’t know when I first began to crave the thrill of cold water. I hated swimming lessons and detested the galas that my school forced me to participate in. But cold water is an innate part of me, and one that other people recognise. Years ago, I convinced a flatmate that my connection to water was down to mum insisting I was born on the seashore. A barefaced lie. As a child on holiday in Majorca, I had stayed in the water so long I turned blue. The manic in me that likes the thrill of the pain. I phoned dad and asked him where my love of wild water came from.

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‘I think you started in rivers and streams in the New Forest’. An image of two girls, their bodies orange and spectral beneath the river swam into my mind. A photograph of my best friend and I, around six or seven, swimming by a bridge in one of the forest rivers. Other children sit on the bank, watching. Mum disagrees. She claims it was open water pools in France that did it. Pools I stayed in all day until forcibly removed at bedtime. Talk to anyone that claims to be a “wild swimmer” and you’ll get a myriad of reasons to do it. For wellbeing, the challenge, the rush. When people stop me on the shoreline and ask why I do it, I find myself repeating the words of author Alexandra Heminsley; that it is a “hangover in reverse”. I told my therapist this. She looked impressed, I felt depressed. I thought about walking into the sea. 

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In one of my final sessions, the hour ended with an explosion of tears and a waterfall of words. What would happen when I left her office to face my depression alone? 

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‘You like the sea, think of it like a wave.’ She told me of her husband, who bought a boat though she detested sailing. On each voyage, she sat in the cabin waiting to return to the marina. ‘He taught me that I have to stand and face the waves. Watch each beast as it comes in. There is nothing that will stop it, but I know it is there and prepare myself for it.’ These days, when I feel the damp creeping back into my bones, I think about walking into the sea.  

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That’s where I am now.  

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A moment ago, stood on the shoreline of my childhood beach, I felt a skirr of air whip at my ear. Looking up I saw it was a gull, though whether black-headed or Mediterranean I couldn’t tell you, I’m still learning the differences. For a while it bobbed on the air, looked haughtily over its wing and with no discernible effort darted left to right in an imaginary slalom. Then it shat in the water before me. One of the lighter hazards of swimming in the sea, I suppose.