Roger Deakin, Waterlog

Back when I read Roger Deakin's Wildwood: A Journey through Trees, I said that I was partly thrilled and partly over it (so to speak). This was his second book of the same time, following his 1999 Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey through Britain, and I'm really curious what effect reading them in the correct sequence would've had on my experience of these two delights.

Because truly, it's a delightful book, and I found its characters less off-putting (there being a smaller proportion of upper-class twits, and a larger proportion of eccentric regular folk), so I wonder whether I would've felt more prepared to accept the further variations in Wildwood, or less tolerant of them.

At bottom, this book is precisely as advertised. Deakin decides to swim outdoors in as many locations as possible across Britain, often with a wetsuit: he floats downriver and walks coated in mud up-river, wearing swim trunks and wetsuit boots; he gets tugged about by currents in the ocean; he dunks himself in freezing tarns and lochs and burns and all those other UK geologicisms; he visits historic swimming holes, both rough (dug-outs and now-silted-in ponds) and polished (urban pools, including in London). Throughout, he keeps reflecting on the history of swimming in Britain, on the British relationship with water and place, and on the patterns of change in relation to landscape, to attitudes to landscape and landscape use, and to swimming.

Even more so than for Wildwood, I don't think a parallel book is possible for Canada, or indeed for virtually any other country. There's just something about British eccentricity, and about the relationship between eccentricity and place, that stands apart. To some extent I want to tie this to the specifically British version of Romanticism that the rest of the world doesn't quite grasp, which is a thing I wasn't able to understand well enough to build my dissertation around it (world enough and time, vaster than empires and more slow, etc), but I'll set that aside for now. This is a unique, charming book about swimming and place, but don't sleep on the simple fact that it's also a portrait of a particular person, and kind of person, who's exceedingly rare.

We've started ocean-swimming a few times a week this year, here on southern Vancouver Island, so I was primed for this book, but that's not a precondition for appreciating Deakin and Waterlog. It'd be a great off-the-wall pick for a gift, for so many people!