Detail from 'The Four Seasons: winter, spring, summer, autumn', wood engraving by Tirzah Garwood (1927)
Showing posts with label swimming. Show all posts
Showing posts with label swimming. Show all posts
Monday, 21 April 2025
Sunday, 2 February 2025
Mermaids Love Clean Seas
Had a quick dip in the cold sea last week at the Walpole Bay Tidal Pool in Margate. Like mermaids, I prefer the sea without pollution.
The mermaid mural in Margate Old Town put me in mind of the similarly themed Sirens of Sewage sculpture by Jason deCaires Taylor on Whitstable beach (next to the Old Neptune pub) depicting SOS Whitstable campaigners for cleaner seas with banners saying 'Save our seas', 'Like the sea we rise' and 'people over profit'.
Saturday, 1 December 2018
Oxford Outdoor Swimming
The rivers of Oxford and its surrounding countryside must have nearly as much literary history flowing in them as water, perhaps nowhere more so than at Port Meadow to the north/west of the city. Most famously Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) is said to have begun telling what became the Alice in Wonderland stories on a boat to Port Meadow with Alice Liddell and her sisters in 1862.
Gerard Manley Hopkins bemoaned the 1879 felling of trees overlooking Port Meadow in his early environmentalist poem 'Binsey Poplars': 'All felled, felled, are all felled...Not spared, not one / That dandled a sandalled / Shadow that swam or sank / On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank'. Most recently, Philip Pulman has recently centred his Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage '3 miles up the river Thames from the centre of Oxford, some distance from where the great colleges… contended for mastery in the boat races, out where the city was only a collection of towers and spires in the distance over the misty levels of Port Meadow'.
In fact the hero of the novel lives, in a different version of our universe, at the Trout Inn - an actual pub next to the Thames at Wolvercote dating back to the 17th century. And it was here back in September that we parked in the car park to swim in the river (as it turned out we could also have parked at the Port Meadow Godstow Car Park a few hundred metres away across the bridge on the meadow side of the river).
This is the first year I've embraced outdoor swimming, trying to keep up with Jools who has led me round the country in search of wild water adventures. At Port Meadow we had a quick dip in the river - at its north west corner it is actually the Wolvercote Mill Stream next to the meadow, flowing to rejoin the Thames from which it draws it water (it once powered the paper mill at Wolvercote which supplied paper to the Oxford University Press).
Just across the old Wolvercote toll bridge there is a rope swing on the stream. We actually got in just a bit further along. The stream was shallow in September, but suitable for breast stroke.
We also checked out Oxford's fine heated outdoor pool - Hinksey Pool dates back to the 1930s and began life as the filter beds of the city waterworks. It's about twenty minutes walk from the city centre, where we went afterwards to check out the 'Spellbound: magic, ritual and witchcraft' exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum.
Gerard Manley Hopkins bemoaned the 1879 felling of trees overlooking Port Meadow in his early environmentalist poem 'Binsey Poplars': 'All felled, felled, are all felled...Not spared, not one / That dandled a sandalled / Shadow that swam or sank / On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank'. Most recently, Philip Pulman has recently centred his Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage '3 miles up the river Thames from the centre of Oxford, some distance from where the great colleges… contended for mastery in the boat races, out where the city was only a collection of towers and spires in the distance over the misty levels of Port Meadow'.
In fact the hero of the novel lives, in a different version of our universe, at the Trout Inn - an actual pub next to the Thames at Wolvercote dating back to the 17th century. And it was here back in September that we parked in the car park to swim in the river (as it turned out we could also have parked at the Port Meadow Godstow Car Park a few hundred metres away across the bridge on the meadow side of the river).
This is the first year I've embraced outdoor swimming, trying to keep up with Jools who has led me round the country in search of wild water adventures. At Port Meadow we had a quick dip in the river - at its north west corner it is actually the Wolvercote Mill Stream next to the meadow, flowing to rejoin the Thames from which it draws it water (it once powered the paper mill at Wolvercote which supplied paper to the Oxford University Press).
Just across the old Wolvercote toll bridge there is a rope swing on the stream. We actually got in just a bit further along. The stream was shallow in September, but suitable for breast stroke.
We also checked out Oxford's fine heated outdoor pool - Hinksey Pool dates back to the 1930s and began life as the filter beds of the city waterworks. It's about twenty minutes walk from the city centre, where we went afterwards to check out the 'Spellbound: magic, ritual and witchcraft' exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum.
Tuesday, 2 January 2018
Swimming art
So 2017 wasn't the year I got into swimming, though I did do a bit, most pleasurably in the tidal pool on Margate sands and briefly in the Atlantic at Estoril in Portugal.
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| Margate |
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| Estoril |
This year I am determined to get some adult lessons so that I can master the breathing and be able to keep going for longer distances. In the mean time, by way of inspiration here's some swimming related art which I saw in the last year
David Hockney's polaroid collage 'Gregory swimming, Los Angeles, 31 March 1982' (detail below) was one of a number of swimming pool pictures included in his retrospective at Tate Britain
Duncan Grant's 'Bathing' (1911) was orginally painted as a mural for the dining room at the Borough Polytechnic, at the Elephant and Castle, London (now London South Bank University). It was included in the 'Queer British Art' exhibition at Tate Britain.
Donna Huddleston's large scale drawings were some of the strongest work in 'Dreamers Awake', a Summer 2017 exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey of work by women surrealists and contemporary artists working in a similar vein.
Huddleston's The Warriors (2015) places a group of young women by a pool like figures in an ancient Egyptian mythical landscape. The artist apparentingly drew on her memories of her school netball team in Australia, the 'Woolloomooloo Warriors’
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| © Donna Huddleston and Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin |
Tuesday, 11 July 2017
The Outrun - Amy Liptrot
Amy Liptrot's The Outrun (2015) is partly another fine example of the new nature writing - urban dweller rediscovers connection with the wild between nicely illustrated covers, in this case through returning to her native Orkney where, among other things, she helps her farmer father in the lambing season and gets a job tracking corncrakes. The Outrun of the title 'is a stretch of coastland at the top of the farm where the grass is always short, pummelled by wind and sea spray year-round... where the ewes and the lambs graze in summer'. That aspect has a not entirely unromantic appeal to me, with my fond memories of my shepherd grandfather in the Hebrides.
But the book is also a memoir of addiction, to alcohol in particular, and the author's struggle to recover after some very messy years in London. Her relationship with the landscape is part of this process. Struggling to believe in 'a power greater than ourselves' as envisaged in the Alcoholics Anonymous 12 step programme, she thinks 'about the forces that I have experienced living on the islands: The wind and the sea. I think of erosion and corrosion… I think of the power of animal instinct, guiding the corncrakes to Africa and me to my lover's house, dead drunk, late at night… I decide that I can accept the existence of some "powers greater than myself" – not God, just the things I've always known, the forces I've grown up with, strong enough to smash up ships and carve islands'.
She walks all over Papay, one of the smaller islands where she lives for a while, including circumnavigating St Tredwell's Loch where once pilgrims seeking relief for eye troubles came to visit the chapel dedicated to a saint who legend claims gouged her own eyes out.
She joins the Orkney Polar Bears who go swimming every Saturday morning in the sea and manages to find through this the beginnings of new compulsions: 'Once after being out all night at a party in a squatted East London warehouse, Gloria and I decided, high and wide eyed, that what we needed was a dawn swim in Hampstead Heath ladies pond. We had grimy rave skin and sleep deprivation and thought the cold water would provide refreshment and even salvation... In the past when I was under stress, my first impulse was to drink… Now, sometimes, I'm not just fighting against these urges but have developed new ones. Even back in the summer, set free after a frustrating day in the RSPB office, my first thought was sometimes not a pint but "get in the sea". Swimming shakes out my tension and provides refreshment and change... The motivation is the same but my methods of dealing with the way I feel are changing. I used to confuse my neurotransmitters on a Friday night in a hot nightclub. Now I shock my senses on a Saturday morning in the biting sea, plunging warm skin into cold water, forcing a rush of sensation, cleansed'.
Interesting how culturally embedded this idea of water as medium of baptism and rebirth is, to swim in the sea or even the Hampstead ponds is to literally plunge into the landscape (or waterscape) and perhaps to emerge with a sense of being somehow cleansed or transformed.
The Outrun is certainly not another rehab through fitness memoir, but the author recognises that part of her recovery is also about a new relationship to her body in movement, including through walking, swimming and scuba diving: 'When I am in motion I am at ease, able to move forward mentally as well as physically. I use walking and swimming to calm my churning thoughts. My sea swims are increasingly important in relieving the non-specific low-level anxiety I often feel. The cold water shocks out any mental stress – my body suddenly has something more immediate to deal with'.
Tuesday, 1 September 2015
Haunts of the Black Masseur
'Haunts of the Black Masseur: the Swimmer as Hero' (1992) is a cultural/literary history of swimming by Charles Sprawson. Its main focus is on writers as swimmers, from the classical period onwards.
For the Romantic poets and those influenced by them, swimming was an embrace of the sublime. Byron considered swimming across the Hellespont in 1810 to be one of his life's greatest achievements, and Edgar Allen Poe was similarly proud of having once swum up the James river against the current. Sprawson compares the Romantic delight in swimming with their fondness for opium, offering 'self-encapsulation in an isolated world, a morbid self-admiration, an absorption in fantasy':
'The passion for bathing really began with the Romantic generation and 'swim' was a word that particularly appealed to poets… The word suggests a state of suspension, a trance-like condition . .. Like the opium addicts of the nineteenth century analysed by Alathea Hayter, these swimmers felt themselves to be pariahs, elect outcasts, insulated from their fellow men. They too often experienced through their swims the classic constituents of an opium dream: "the feeling of blissful buoyancy, the extension of time, contrasts of temperature, the bliss of the outcast." .. Swimming, like opium, can cause a sense of detachment from ordinary life. Memories, especially those of childhood, can be evoked with startling strength and in vivid and precise detail'.
There was also a sexual element - Paul Valery referred to swimming as 'fornication avec l'onde' and wrote: 'I discover and recognise myself when I return to this universal element. My body becomes the direct instrument of my mind, the author of its ideas. To plunge into water, to move one's whole body, from head to toe, in its wild and graceful beauty; to twist about in its pure depths, this is for me a delight only comparable to love'.
Sprawson provides some useful social history too, reminding us that while there may always have been people who swam, swimming as a sport with its own dedicated spaces is a more recent development. The rise in popular swimming in Britain was linked with the fashion for bathing at sea resorts from late 18th century, with the first organised races seemingly organised in the 1830s. The first indoor public pools to be built in Britain since Roman times were likewise built in the 19th century.
Styles of swimming have also changed over time. The breaststroke was dominant in English swimming in the first half of the 19th century and Sprawson tells us that 'Frogs were kept in tubs by the sides of pools as a means of instruction'. The later rise of overarm swimming was influenced by Native American swimming styles, through the medium of such swimmers as Flying Gull and Tobacco who raced the English swimming champion Kenworthy in 1845 'and amazed Londoners with their over-arm windmill stroke'.
For the Romantic poets and those influenced by them, swimming was an embrace of the sublime. Byron considered swimming across the Hellespont in 1810 to be one of his life's greatest achievements, and Edgar Allen Poe was similarly proud of having once swum up the James river against the current. Sprawson compares the Romantic delight in swimming with their fondness for opium, offering 'self-encapsulation in an isolated world, a morbid self-admiration, an absorption in fantasy':
'The passion for bathing really began with the Romantic generation and 'swim' was a word that particularly appealed to poets… The word suggests a state of suspension, a trance-like condition . .. Like the opium addicts of the nineteenth century analysed by Alathea Hayter, these swimmers felt themselves to be pariahs, elect outcasts, insulated from their fellow men. They too often experienced through their swims the classic constituents of an opium dream: "the feeling of blissful buoyancy, the extension of time, contrasts of temperature, the bliss of the outcast." .. Swimming, like opium, can cause a sense of detachment from ordinary life. Memories, especially those of childhood, can be evoked with startling strength and in vivid and precise detail'.
There was also a sexual element - Paul Valery referred to swimming as 'fornication avec l'onde' and wrote: 'I discover and recognise myself when I return to this universal element. My body becomes the direct instrument of my mind, the author of its ideas. To plunge into water, to move one's whole body, from head to toe, in its wild and graceful beauty; to twist about in its pure depths, this is for me a delight only comparable to love'.
Sprawson provides some useful social history too, reminding us that while there may always have been people who swam, swimming as a sport with its own dedicated spaces is a more recent development. The rise in popular swimming in Britain was linked with the fashion for bathing at sea resorts from late 18th century, with the first organised races seemingly organised in the 1830s. The first indoor public pools to be built in Britain since Roman times were likewise built in the 19th century.
Styles of swimming have also changed over time. The breaststroke was dominant in English swimming in the first half of the 19th century and Sprawson tells us that 'Frogs were kept in tubs by the sides of pools as a means of instruction'. The later rise of overarm swimming was influenced by Native American swimming styles, through the medium of such swimmers as Flying Gull and Tobacco who raced the English swimming champion Kenworthy in 1845 'and amazed Londoners with their over-arm windmill stroke'.
Monday, 23 March 2015
The Art of Athletics (7): David Hockney on jogging and smoking
David Hockney's most celebrated works feature Californian swimming pools, most notably his A Bigger Splash (1967) which I saw recently at Tate Britain.
Runners feature in his 'The Seven Stone Weakling', one of his Rake's Progress series of prints documenting the artist's first time in New York in the early 1960s.
It is the artist himself who watches blankly as two men run past, and Hockney's slightly bemused attitude to fitness continues to this day. In an article in the FT last year in defence of smoking in the open air he wrote:
'I remember the time I used to walk up through Holland Park to Lucian Freud’s studio. Seeing the black rabbits playing on the grass I sat down to watch them, and lit a cigarette. Then some magpies joined them and I was enjoying it. Then along came three girls jogging, who on seeing me smoking gave me a no-no salute. I pondered them and noticed they had not seen the magpies or the rabbits. They thought they were very healthy, but I thought I was healthier. They were obsessed with their own bodies. When people are jogging they are thinking of body management; when you walk the mind can range over far and wide. Walking is better than running, which wears out your knees and leaves you with excruciating shin pain'.
Of course I don't agree with him about running - the mind can range far and wide while running even if both runners and walkers can be so wrapped up in their own thoughts that they fail to notice their surroundings. But I am sympathetic to his opposition to banning smoking in parks - something that has already happened in New York and has been proposed for London. We don't have to like everything that people do in 'The parks, the great unroofed outdoors, places where people are not crowded together like on the street' (Hockney), but I think for the most part people should be free to do what they like as long as it doesn't genuinely harm other people. Some people would ban smokers, others would ban drinking, dogs, groups of young people, music or sports. No doubt some people find hundreds of runners charging round their local park on a Saturday morning an inconvenience, but parks would be dead spaces if every activity that mildly irritated somebody else was banned. I don't particularly like getting the occasional mouthful of smoke if I run past somebody smoking, they might not like their peaceful morning stroll being disturbed by me, but we have to get along - as they say at every parkrun briefing, remember you are not the only park users.
See also in the Art of Athletics series:
Sunday, 21 September 2014
Peckham Pioneer Centre: 1930s swimming pool
As part of the Open House London weekend, I went on a tour this morning of the former Pioneer Centre in St Mary's Road, Peckham. The building opened in 1935 as part of a radical public health initiative known as the Peckham Experiment. Rather than offering medical treatments, the emphasis was on keeping people healthy - the building included a gym, swimming pool and dance hall, among other facilities for local families. It closed in the 1950s, and after a period as an adult education college, was converted to private flats in the late 1990s.
The original pool from the 1930s is still there, though it's diving board is no longer in use as the depth of the pool at that end was reduced during the conversion of the building
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| Swimmers at the pool when it was part of the health centre |
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| An exercise class on the roof of the Pioneer Centre |
Tuesday, 6 May 2014
Emily Wardill - Swimming Art
A fine piece of swimming art by Emily Wardill which I saw at the weekend in Enclave Gallery, Deptford as part of the 'Detours: After Detournement' exhibition.
The work is entitled 'Better to have loved and lost' (2014) and is ink on cotton.
Detail:
Monday, 21 April 2014
Swimming Studies
Despite the fact that I currently have a case of what is sometimes known as 'Swimmer's Shoulder' (Impingement Syndrome), I rarely swim. Nevertheless I really enjoyed reading 'Swimming Studies' by Leanne Shapton, a book where the author reflects on her experiences as a competitive not-quite Olympic standard teenage swimmer in Canada and on the later meaning of swimming to her in her life as an artist (seemingly spending a lot of time in nice hotels with swimming pools around the world). The book is illustrated with her impressionistic sketches of pools and swimmers, as well as pictures of her apparently extensive collection of swimwear, vintage and modern.
Mostly I liked it because it so well written; beat this for an opening paragraph: 'Water is elemental, it’s what we’re made of, what we can’t live within or without. Trying to define what swimming means to me is like looking at a shell sitting in a few feet of clear, still water. There it is, in sharp focus, but once I reach for it, breaking the surface, the ripples refract the shell. It becomes five shells, twenty-five shells, some smaller, some larger, and I blindly feel for what I saw perfectly before trying to grasp it' (p.1).
There are also some obvious parallels between swimming and running, not least the focus on time: 'Because of time standards - provincial, national, and international - swimmers' goals are temporal and their efforts interior rather than adversarial or gladiatorial. The sport is judged by the indifferent clock. When I swam, I always saw familiar faces in my heats, but I knew them by their times - in descending tenths and hundredths of seconds - as much as by their names' (p.27).
Shapton also caused me to reflect on the transition from the pressure of youth athletics with the dream of Olympic medals to swimming or running in later life. A lot of people, like myself, seem to have taken up running in their 30s, 40s or older, having not run seriously since their school days. I sometimes hear people who were good teenage runners say that they wish they'd stuck with it when they were younger, but reading Shapton reminded me why that often doesn't happen. For the serious young athlete, training can involve putting in hours every day, and missing out on some of the more carefree pursuits of their peers. Of course it can be very rewarding, but also exhausting, monotonous and painful:
'as good athletes, we defined ourselves as special, then submitted to a routine in which we did exactly as we were told. I think of the limitations that "specialness" requires: doing a series of very unspecialised things, very well, over and over, a million times over, so that one special thing might happen, maybe, much later... I remember the blunt fact that when I was training I was in constant pain. Not just the sharp pain in my knees, which was taken seriously, but a dull, steady pain in my arms, back, shoulders. Pain when I sat down, pain when I got up, pain when I leaned back in a chair, pain when I reached for the salt or sharpened a pencil... It was as though pain on land was there to remind me to get back in the water, where, after a certain threshold, the pain went away. For an athlete pain is not a deterrent, because the only place the pain will be eclipsed is in practice or in competition' p.223-4).
The paradox is that achieving sporting excellence seems to require young people to dedicate themselves to a narrow path precisely at the time when the whole world is opening up in front of them - and that what leads to some realizing their dreams can also destroy the pleasure of running, or swimming, for many years to come.
My own pleasure in swimming never really recovered from when I was learning as a child and the instructor pushed me into the pool when I hesitated before jumping. He then had to dive in to rescue me, and then face my angry dad! But maybe it's not too late to learn some decent technique, a work colleague of mine recently learnt to swim from scratch just so she could take part in a triathlon so I know it can be done. Mind you she was Australian so probably had absorbed some swimmingness just from being down the beach so often!
Friday, 3 January 2014
Audrey Hepburn running, cycling and swimming
Audrey Hepburn would have been 85 today (she was born on 4 May 1929 and died on 20 January 1993). Judging by these photos of her running, cycling and swimming perhaps she could have been a triathlete if she hadn't made it as an actress- though perhaps a rather languid, unhurried triathlete!
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| (Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly , Breakfast at Tiffany's - these lines are actually spoken to her by the 'Fred' character, played by George Peppard) |
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| Audrey Hepburn running with dog (guessing she didn't run too far in those shoes) |
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| Audrey Hepburn running with deer |
(more Audrey Hepburn cycling photos at Adventure Journal)
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| Hepburn in 'Two for the Road' (1967) |
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| During the filming of 'Two for the Road' |
[actually posted this on 4 May 2014, but as I'd started a draft earlier, Blogger published it as 3 January 2014]
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