#60: FEAR AND LOATHING IN THE OCEAN

Water is good, obviously. The Stuff of Life. I remember being told in school that it is something like 60% of our bodies. Having only a rudimentary grasp of Maths, and anatomy, I found this to be a difficult idea to accept. Thinking of the body like a human-shaped pie-chart, this must surely mean that the water part, proportionately, came up to your rib-cage, and yet this was palpably not true. It's all in the cells, apparently, which is why we die without it, whereas we can go without food for ages. Alan Bennett once said that asking him about his sexuality was like asking a man in the desert whether he preferred Evian or Malvern. I suppose our cells feel the same way.

It's interesting how water has developed such a high profile. We now order tap water in restaurants, fixing the waiter with a long, hard, stare, defying him to disapprove, or show his disappointment. 

I can't be the only person who thinks that bottled water is a fetish inside a scam: I long for the exposé of some Alpine brand, bottling icy fresh spring-water from the mountainside, in their advertising, but actually plumbed into the water mains on an industrial estate outside Zurich. And of course even the natural stuff passes through ground laced with bacteria, trace elements, heavy metals and mountain goat carcasses. It is only a coincidence that Evian is an anagram of naïve, obviously.

I like cold water in a glass, even if it's half empty, showers are nice to wash in, and washing machines are almost indispensable. Beyond these essentials, I have my doubts....

My grandmother, Clara, had a lodger. His name was Peter, he used industrial quantities of Brylcreem on his hair, so that it appeared to be dripping the stuff, and he had one leg shorter than the other. He limped heavily, which could not be disguised and made him very self-conscious and rather shy. He was very good to my grandmother, doing errands and manual work for her as well as paying rent (just how good remains wreathed in the mysteries of history but she was a game old bird, as they say).

Peter kept himself to himself, which these days would probably mean studying gynaecological websites on the Net, but then meant an evening course in mechanics or studying fishing magazines. He had some transport then, in the early 50s, which was before many people had cars. He had a motorcycle and when he was riding it he became someone else: upright, confident and assured,  with no hint of disability, the self he would have been (if only…). The bike was actually a combination with sidecar, which looked more like a coach-built pram than anything else. But to a young boy it was more than that, it was an extra cockpit alongside the intrepid pilot in his leathers, in their Spitfire, searching the horizon for the Hun in his Messerschmidt.

One time, he suggested that he take me swimming on a Saturday morning at Durnsford Road, Bounds Green, now a Garden Centre. The ride was thrilling. I loved the massage of the wind and the view in every direction, free as air; and the engine throbbing at my right shoulder. The swimming wasn’t so good, because I couldn’t. Peter made a few attempts to get me going, but I couldn’t entrust my spindly body (often likened to an anorexic sparrow) to either him or the natural buoyancy of the waves in N.22. Peter said “wait there, I’m going to the Gents” and I went and sat just to the right of the high diving board, with my legs dangling in the water, taking the sun. It all happened very quickly. One moment I was dreaming up a Battle of Britain scenario for the ride/flight home, with Peter as a kind of Douglas Bader figure, a tad short in the leg department, and me as his loyal sidekick, like Ginger was to Biggles, shoulder to shoulder, shooting down the Boche at will. The next, I was roughly projected into the deepest part of the Deep End, spiralling downwards, leaving the turquoise Hockney-like sky and water to make their magic swirling admixture, further and further above me.

I do remember the beautiful though worrying cloud of air bubbles all around me, formerly the contents of my lungs, now rapidly being replaced by gallons of the London Water Board’s finest, seasoned with chlorine, and never designed for internal consumption. I think I blacked out at this point: I have no recollection of being fished out, or by who, just coming round, coughing and vomiting violently and some people clapping. I guess I had artificial respiration, but definitely not mouth-to-mouth. I would have remembered my first kiss, and besides, though I’m no historian of resuscitation techniques, I‘m not sure we had it then. Mouth-to-mouth was restricted then to film stars with one foot on the bedroom floor. Before we got home. Peter asked me, imploringly, if I’d mind very much not mentioning it to my grandmother: she might think he’d let us down. I think it was the first time I’d seen an adult behaving like a child, craven and diminished; Biggles had become Private Pike in Dad’s Army.

Wild sidecars wouldn’t drag me near the water for some years after that. I was excused swimming lessons at school even though drowning in 3 feet of water would be a prodigious feat involving cudgels and divers’ lead weights. But on a family holiday in Pembrokeshire, in an unguarded moment, I found myself swimming: less efficiently than the family dog, and with the exact same style, but swimming nonetheless. I had just forgotten myself, and my fears, and my trauma, launched myself forward, thrashed a few limbs, and not sunk to the bottom instantly. Within hours I was doing a modest breast stroke and a kerb-like crawl.

I threw myself into this with such enthusiasm that I developed severe abdominal pains and was rushed to hospital and was about to have an appendectomy before they realised their error in diagnosis: it was simply torn abdominal muscles. So, one way and another, I got over my fear of water (fear of drowning, strictly speaking) and became an averagely good swimmer – enough to do 20 lengths of a public pool on a regular basis.

The sea, however, is a different kettle of fish. I love it, to look at. Watch the sun set over the Pacific in California, the surf in North Cornwall and any one of a hundred other seascapes, and you are stilled by its beauty and its brute force, its grandeur, its blue-green-greyness and its sheer moodiness. For me, the sea comes second only to the mountains in putting us in touch with timelessness.

But by the same token, it is the population of the sea, equally lethal, which lingers around the back of my mind when I walk down the beach and see my body slowly disappear with immersion. That’s the problem: other than in a few exotic locations, you can’t really see what’s going on down there with all that pesky reflection and refraction, let alone pollution. You can be 2 metres away from some murderous, red-in-tooth-and-fin creature and not have a clue. Think of the armoury that can be deployed against your vulnerable and luminous white body: stings, from the mildest little fish to the delinquent jellyfish, to the psychopathic sting ray, which can dispatch you with a single blow. Strangulation by squids and octopuses, a special subdivision of drowning, because it’s not the excessive affection which kills you it’s the absence of air. And finally the whole genus of fish who want to eat you, remove limbs to eat like rather underdone spare ribs, or crunch you up or swallow you whole.

Apparently, sharks can sense human blood in the water from a quarter of a mile away. So just like in the movie, boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom, you are goofing about in the shallows when the beast in question boom-boom boom-boom scents the slight taste of human blood from where you jagged your ankle on the coral, a primeval dinner gong sounds in his head, and he’s off, boom-boom, boom-boom, swimming very fast underneath the surface, for a date with your legs. Two minutes later, what are you? Sharkuterie is what you are. Instinctively I knew from the start that swimming was dangerous.

None of these things can be found at the pool in the local Leisure Centre. But along with the sea’s monopoly of beauty and power comes less welcome attributes like its ability to snuff you out like a candle flame, in a heartbeat (perhaps ‘in a final heartbeat’): drowning, currents, whirlpools, swept out to sea, tsunami, hurricanes, typhoons, storms, perfect storms, tidal waves, undertow, all can take you. Stinging, stunning, poisoning or paralysing, choking, crushing, it’s a bewildering choice of ways to die sub aqua, for they would all be fatal by virtue of being in deep water. And there’s a whole other range of hazards which I will just mention ‘in passing’: probably not fatal but also not forgotten in a hurry should you bump into it: effluent outflow. 

An unduly pessimistic view of the oceans? Not at all: I’m a shark-half-full kind of person.

Unquestionably a book of leisure centre tickets and fake tan is the cheaper option, and so much safer. Who wants to show up in a fish restaurant not as a customer but as part of the main course? Like those medieval feasts: fish inside chicken inside a rack of lamb, inside a side of beef, or something like that: man inside a shark.

I’m happy to go to Andalusia from time to time: not to a Costa on the Med but to a mountain village, with a large communal pool. Hasta la vista, baby.

The Guardian runs a weekly feature in which readers are invited to submit a 300 word piece  on a song which had some particular significance in their lives. In the online version the song is played alongside the article. A while ago they published my submission: it is beyond my skill-set to locate this from the archives and reproduce it here but here is the song and the text. 

The song concerns a young woman, disappointed in love, who needs to leave town, quickly and quietly, avoiding people, explanations and traffic. She imagines putting on a woolly hat, old jeans and most of all her skates, and heading up the frozen river - perhaps to Canada. Its a very graphic, very lyrical image which is never realised as there is no snow, let alone any icy track. Before you read my version, have some tissues to hand. 

Water is the driving force of all nature.  Leonardo da Vinci 

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water. W.H.Auden

From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.      Arthur Conan Doyle

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.                                                                                                      Jacques Yves Cousteau

This week the gallery-space is devoted to the photographs of my friend, Sean Sprague, who spends a great deal of time travelling the world to take pictures of development projects for the charities and agencies who support them. Nice work...

It is not intentionally ironic to include these photos at this time in a post on 'water', given the chronic water-shortages in Africa, as a much a cause of the famine as political factors and warfare. It is simply that Sean posted them on FB recently and I took the opportunity to showcase them now.

monk reading from the scriptures in a cave, Ethiopia

With this 60th post, The Items has passed a landmark 30,000 total views (and for the last 3 months, the average readership per week has been over 1500).  So either 30k people have viewed it once, or there is someone with a repetition compulsion, with way too much time on his hands. Either way, thank you for your support...I just hope that sometime before the Great Referee in the Sky blows his whistle on me for full-time, somebody breaks the silence and leaves a comment in the box at the end of the post. Gwan....it's anonymous if you want it to be.