Waterlog by Roger Deakin

Author:Roger Deakin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446442852
Publisher: Random House

14

THE BLANDFORD BOMBER

Dorset, 31 July

I HAD LOST THE rest of a long weekend altogether in Cornwall, in a welter of feverish dreams, mostly filled with anxiety about the troublesome task with which I had somehow saddled myself. The idea of swimming another stroke seemed entirely out of the question and I was no longer even sure which day it was. Visions like the sea paintings of Hokusai gripped me as I rose and dipped giddily in and out of consciousness. I was at the mercy of great tidal waves, or swept, gasping, down gigantic white-water versions of the Thames or Humber. The alarming thought occurred to me that I might actually be turning into Ned Merrill. In ‘The Swimmer’, Merrill sets off on his triathlon of swimming, jogging and drinking his way through the private pools of Long Island in apparently good condition, but then things begin to go subtly wrong, and he eventually finds himself wading through a thunderstorm, half-crazy, and on the verge of hypothermia. Sentences from the story floated into my mind and haunted me: ‘He had swum too long, he had been immersed too long, and his nose and his throat were sore from the water.’ Was this Weil’s disease, come to catch up with me after my dismissive comments amongst the coracle swimmers on the River Avon?

I have a vague recollection that it was Monday when I dragged myself up to friends in Dorset for a rest cure in a hammock in a hilltop orchard. The weather, with its usual sense of irony, was magnificent. The doctor said it wasn’t Weil’s, just flu or a throat infection (‘Probably picked it up in the sea,’ he said cheerfully), and after two days aloft in the hammock, and many cups of tea, I was ready for the beach and the cold-water cure of the Dorset coast.

Some of the best sea-bathing in the whole of England is to be had in Dorset, from the glamorous sands of Bournemouth all the way to the crumbling cliffs of Lyme Regis. Given the right weather, it is an ideal place to indulge yourself in some serial swimming. It was in Dorset that I had first tried out my idea of an amphibious ramble, when I had swum consecutively, the previous year, off Studland Bay, Dancing Ledge, Kimmeridge Bay, Lulworth Cove, Stair Hole, Durdle Dor, Ringstead Bay and Chesil Beach in the space of a few days. At seaweedy Kimmeridge I mingled with mullet too lazy to move, and lay so long on the hot rocks, the fossilised relics of a 140-million-year-old tropical seabed, that ammonites imprinted themselves all over me. I hadn’t quite reached Burton Bradstock, two miles from Bridport, which is where we now descended from the hilltop.

On our way to the beach, we chanced upon Peter and Barbara, some friends of my hosts. They were a handsome, bronzed couple from Portland Bill who confirmed to us that they practically lived on the beach. We encamped together under the hot cliffs on the pebble ridge of high tide.

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