by Tom Cox
There was no sunset this evening, no spaces for it between the rain. I realised the smattering of other people around Abbot Richard Whiting’s death church – an Italian teenager and her mum, a middle-aged dog walker, a tall, elderly man in a dress – had descended the hill, leaving just the three of us alone on the summit. Below us rabbits hopped along the strip lynchets, which might or might not be an ancient maze and not strip lynchets at all, and into burrows, which might or might not lead to a labyrinth and the faerie underworld. So much of Glastonbury was about speculation: it had been that way for centuries, long before the shops had signs outside offering ‘Free Vibes’ and people went there to buy black onyx crystals and a guidebook on how to practise palmistry on a child. We looked across to the north, towards the two old oak trees known locally as Gog and Magog, and the farm where Wes grew up. Gog had been narrowly saved from destruction by fire a couple of years ago, when a tealight candle left in its branches had set it ablaze. Some claimed the two trees were 2,000 years old, but, as Johanna and Steve pointed out, that was more classic Glastonbury spin, as it’s well known that oaks do not live that long and the oldest in Britain, the Bowthorpe Oak, in Lincolnshire, is not far past its thousandth birthday.
I decided Steve and Johanna were very Glastonbury in the best way: they weren’t totally ensnared by New Age thinking, mocked themselves frequently, liked to read widely, ask questions and think stuff out, but they were simultaneously very open to magic and the unknown, and without that openness their own story could surely never have been the lovely thing it was. I accepted their invitation to drink some Avalonian cider at their flat. On the way down the back of the Tor, where the death church peeks back over the shoulder of the hill to check you aren’t up to no good, the rain prompted us all to recall the last drastically wet winter, five years ago. It was the winter that ended with me relocating from the dry far east of the UK to the West Country, when nearly every house I visited in Somerset, Dorset or Devon had sandbags around its threshold: the last time the Levels, the Great Low Moor, had severely flooded. ‘It was terrible for a lot of people and they lost a lot of possessions and had to leave their homes,’ remembered Johanna. ‘But from up here it looked magical. There was water everywhere below. You really did feel like you were on an island in an ancient sea.’
JENNY DOESN’T LIVE HERE
(2014–19)
The lunar eclipse had just happened and people in town were saying it had been having a dramatic effect on everyone’s sleep, infiltrating dreams in troubling, vivid ways. Always a bit out of step with town, I’d slept soundly during the eclipse and got my weird dreams out of the way a week earlier. In one dream, my washing machine, which already displayed a tendency towards nomadism, totally broke free of my house to start a new life on the road, performing for coins. In perhaps the most disturbing dream, I dream-woke on my back, floating in deep water, having made the error of falling asleep in the sea. I sort of assumed in the dream that I was somewhere a few hundred yards off the shore of the hard-to-get-to Devon cove where I had done most of my recent swimming, but in truth there was no landmark to suggest I was actually near that cove, apart from the sea, which, while undoubtedly a very distinctive landmark, is a landmark only specific enough to tell you that you are somewhere on 70 per cent of the planet’s surface. I did get a sense that it was the particular kind of sea you get near that cove, but I couldn’t be sure. I woke up again, and realised that this was a proper waking and that I was in my bed and hadn’t really woken up in the sea at all.
It probably makes sense that I’d dream such a dream – a dream combining freedom, homeliness, comfort and danger – about my favourite Devon cove. I had been going to the cove regularly for over four years and developed a relationship with it that had, at times, bordered on addiction. Through the cove, I could to an extent tell the recent story of my life: the books I had read, the books I had failed to read, the changes to my body, the little shifts in life philosophy. I had fallen in love at first sight twice on the cove – quite a high ratio when you compare it to the same period inland, where I had only fallen in love at first sight once. In my garden there are a small selection of stones from the cove, including a chunk of smoothed tarmac, which looks like a conglomerate puddingstone but on closer inspection is almost certainly a former part of the road a couple of miles away beside Slapton Ley, which was violently ripped apart by Storm Emma in early 2018, in an astonishing reminder of the brute force of nature the likes of which you don’t see often in the UK. I have been physically attacked at the cove on fifteen occasions that I can pinpoint: fourteen of them by jellyfish, and once by a black Labrador, which swam over to me and climbed on my back, leaving my ribs covered in scratches. I doubt any of these attacks can be considered malicious: the jellyfish were just defending space that is rightfully more theirs than mine, and I think the Labrador – which was owned by a semi-oblivious Dutch man – just wanted a nice, big, wet cuddle. At least the salt water quickly went to work on my injuries, as it has done on pretty much every injury I have had upon my arrival at the beach, magically curing small patches of eczema, cuts and bites.
Down at the far end of the cove is a small, unofficial nudist section. I could probably join its ranks, as I feel increasingly relaxed about the idea of being naked in public and in the water, but something stops me – maybe it’s the memory of those jellyfish stings. The nudists are nearly all 65-plus and uniformly almond-brown. Clothed people arrive, have barbecues, throw balls for dogs, get in the water and yelp about the cold, then leave, but the nudists abide: sleeping a bit, swimming a bit, sleeping some more. I have seen no evidence that they ever leave the cove. I would not be surprised at all to venture into the caves beneath the cliffs and find the hobs where they cook their fresh mackerel breakfasts, the beds where they sleep and have surprisingly agile pensioner sex, and the showers where they scrub the pebbles and salt off their wiry old bodies. Maybe people who have visited the cove a few times think not dissimilar thoughts about me. ‘That hippie with all the dog scratches on his chest is here again,’ they might say. ‘I wonder which subterranean part of these cliffs is his home.’
I don’t think the cove is the best cove in Devon and Cornwall for swimming – there are warmer coves, with clearer, more benevolent water and better rocks to leap from – but in an equation which weighs up ease-of-swim and proximity to the two houses in Devon where I’ve lived, it has worked out as the logical choice. I have grown to trust the cove, without in any way making the mistake of taking it for granted. While swimming there, I often starfish out and let myself float. It’s my sea-swimming equivalent of the time you might take for a breather between lengths at a pool, and doubles as a version of meditation for someone who always intends to meditate but rarely does. I am very relaxed when I’m in this state, my mind a fuzzy blank, preoccupied only by the tiny noises beneath the surface, which, like everything at the cove, are always subtly changing. I doubt I could fall asleep in this state, I am not complacent enough to fully give myself over to a state in which I could – unlike in my dream. This lack of complacency might be a result of the period during my childhood when my dad would regularly convince himself that my mum was going to fall asleep in the bath. ‘TOM, ARE YOU UPSTAIRS?’ my dad would ask. ‘Yeah,’ I would reply. ‘CAN YOU CHECK YOUR MUM HASN’T FALLEN ASLEEP IN THE BATH?’ Following which I would knock on the bathroom door and ask my mum if she had fallen asleep in the bath and my mum would confirm that she had not fallen asleep in the bath.
A lot of people in south-west Devon call the cove ‘Jenny’s Cove’ but that’s not what it’s called. Jenny’s Cove is much smaller and directly next door and anyone who enjoys studying maps would know that, but a fact of life I have slowly and reluctantly come to accept is that most people don’t enjoy studying maps. People have a tendency to hear a name being used by somebody else and start using it too, unquestioningly. It’s not dissimilar to the recent trend of people adding ‘s’ to the word ‘vinyl’ just because they have heard
others doing it – a phenomenon I find baffling, especially considering that when I tried to start a trend for calling cattle ‘cattles’ it didn’t catch on at all. It is entirely possible that one day so many people will call Not Jenny’s Cove ‘Jenny’s Cove’ that the Ordnance Survey, with a deep, defeated sigh, will rename it. In May 2018, on my birthday weekend, I visited it with a group of friends, including my friend Jenny, which you might consider apt, if you lie down and accept that we are living in a post-truth world. The tide was in, making it very difficult for Jenny to swim around the corner to her actual cove, and we were in an unpedantic mood so agreed to let her hang out with us in the cove that is only designated hers because of modern gossip and hearsay.
Jenny, her boyfriend Pat, and our other friends Jim, Neal and Amy sunbathed and swam a little. Meanwhile, having been acclimatising myself to the temperature of the water over several weeks, I threw myself in and did a couple of lengths of the cove. A few people, such as Jim, who is from Sheffield and had last seen the sea during the 1890s, looked at me like I was mad, but nobody was bold enough to point it out, unlike on a far colder day a month earlier, when a paddleboarder had rowed past me in the same place and remarked, ‘Look at you! You’re crazy!’ Not Jenny’s Cove is known for having the most mysteriously cold water on the whole of the south Devon coast, but craziness is all relative. I probably seem bold and hardcore to some by doing long swims in nine-degree water, without a wetsuit, fairly early in the year, but a single encounter with a serious outdoor swimmer who lives in the Lake District or Scotland will disabuse you of this notion. In swimming, as in life, it doesn’t matter how hardcore you are, there is always somebody out there more hardcore than you. My friend James is amazing to me, as he can swim two lengths of the local lido entirely underwater. But what is he, ultimately, compared to Elise Wallenda, who was famous in Victorian times for being able to undress, sew, write, eat and drink underwater, and in 1898 managed to stay submerged for a record four minutes and forty-five and two-fifths seconds?
On that day in May when my friends and I visited Not Jenny’s Cove, the temperature was about twenty degrees, there was a light breeze and the water was the colour of used bathwater into which somebody had spilt half a glass of milk. I would estimate that I have visited the cove around a hundred times over the last five years and each time it has been a slightly different place. One day in late summer 2018, the sea was full of dead wasps. The week before, large waves drove diagonally towards the east side of the beach and, swimming back against them, into the wind and sun, my eyes burned with salt and the journey took almost three times as long as usual. A month earlier I’d arrived and the water had been so placid and clear I could almost pick out every individual jellyfish and driftwood chunk from the top of the cliff, around a hundred feet above the surface. I swam out to my friend Nick’s boat, ate half a melon, jumped in a couple of times, and briefly forgot I wasn’t in a big lake. One day in August the previous year the beach was covered in thousands of dead whitebait, glinting in the sun – a mass suicide pact, voted a preferable alternative to being eaten by a shoal of hungry mackerel. The place stank so pungently, I cut my swim short. The sea teemed with debris, like overly herby soup. The pebbles, which at the west end of the beach teeter on the line that separates stone from sand, had a tired look and the untidy melancholy of summer’s conclusion was apparent.
If I were to see footage of myself in 2014, the first time I stood high on the cliffs before my maiden descent to Not Jenny’s Cove, I’d probably be a little taken aback at what a different physical being I was in comparison to the one I am now. I certainly wasn’t overweight at that point but since then swimming has transformed my body into a collection of angles. I’m broader, lighter, sharper at the edges, more upright. A swimmer’s body is light years away from the body that has become the cliched goal of the twenty-first-century gym junkie. Look at footage of Mark Spitz in the 1972 Munich Olympics, as he gets ready to dive, on the way to one of the record seven gold medals he won that year: he’s not at all beefy; he’s a bronzed javelin. To my mind no high-profile sportsman has ever looked cooler. Spitz was asked by a Russian journalist whether the moustache he grew for that Olympics – against the wishes of the American team coach – slowed him down. He replied that, on the contrary, it deflected the water from his mouth, allowing him to get into a lower, more dynamic position while racing (Spitz claims the article resulting from this immediately prompted every male professional swimmer in Russia to grow a moustache). It is when I’m at my most swimming-obsessed that I come closest to shaving off my beard for the first time in aeons and taming my hair’s customary seaweed wildness. I get into a borderline trance state and swimming is all that matters. ‘Might this small personal change help me swim more pleasurably?’ I wonder. It is pointless: I am not a technically adept outdoor swimmer and, although I am improving, even if I one day become a technically excellent swimmer I am too old to do anything useful with it. But it is the pointlessness that’s a big part of the appeal. I am not swimming for my livelihood, or to impress anyone; I’m not even doing it primarily to improve my body (although that has been a not unpleasant by-product). I’m doing it for the way it makes me feel.
Swimming has taught me a lot about the true chemistry of feeling good. It’s very easy to believe that levels of personal happiness are entirely reliant on all the exterior factors impinging on your life at that time – financial fortunes, friendships, relationships, ups and downs with work – but being in the water, particularly being in a large natural body of water, brings you away from that line of thinking, makes you realise how many of these influencing factors are beyond your control, and ultimately unsolvable, and that at any time your happiness can be primarily down to your immediate environment at that exact moment, if you let go and allow it. Over each successive summer, I’ve come to value the cove more and more as an admin-free space, away from all the clutter and spiritual luggage, where you don’t have to ‘sort it all out’; you just have to exist. I have done some of my best thinking there. It might be the root of the reason that, when I am creatively blocked, my first response is often to take a bath. As Annette Kellermann, the champion Australian swimmer of the early twentieth century said: ‘Swimming cultivates imagination; the man with the most is he who can swim his solitary course night or day and forget a black earth full of people that push.’ The history of swimming is full of inspiring, heroic, outsider figures, few more so than Kellermann, who was a vegetarian all her life (before it was fashionable), became the first major actress to appear nude in a mainstream film, and during her career in Hollywood performed all her own stunts, including diving from over ninety feet into a pool full of crocodiles.
I see much more clearly since I’ve been a regular swimmer, and one of the things I see is that I have always loved being in water, that my binge swimming of the last five years is a kind of coming back to myself. When I used to go to the local swimming pool with my mum and dad I’d be so impatient to get in that, while they were still getting into their costumes, I’d paddle in the footbath at the threshold of the changing rooms. The first time I moved to a house beside a river, I immediately stripped down to my underwear and leaped in, before the van was even unpacked, with no premeditation, in much the way an unruly dog might. I did the first truly addictive swimming of my life alongside my dad, the two of us repeatedly diving into an Italian pool in the summers of 1982, 1983 and 1984, more child and child than father and son; on a couple of the same holidays my cousin Fay did the same off the back of a pedalo in the tranquil harbour at Menton, just across the French border. But I have no recollection of being taught to swim properly, only that my early school swimming lessons were taken in a dingy pool in an insalubrious part of Nottingham with an instructor independent of the school itself who had a reputation for being very stern, and for flicking his bogeys into the water.
In the winter of 2019 I began swimming lessons with Charlie Loram, who teaches the Shaw Method, a style of swimming originated
by former champion swimmer Steven Shaw which uses elements of Alexander technique to create a more effortless stroke and a greater general sense of well-being. Charlie shot a video of me doing front crawl and what primarily emerged from this was solid evidence that in the water I am less dolphin and more spaniel. I am not alone in this, apparently. In many other regions of the planet, humans adapt themselves to their environment. In Western society, by contrast, we have adapted our environment to us. This has plenty of downsides, one being that we don’t use our bodies as effectively as we could. With Charlie, I began not just relearning how to swim, but unlearning decades of bad habits: mainly bad posture caused by too much time in cars, too much time in front of screens, too much time sitting in awkward positions. An additional reason for the very non-dynamic head position I had adopted for many years is no doubt the recurring ear infections I suffered for most of my twenties: a searing pain and occasional bleeding in both ears that led me, on my doctor’s advice, to forgo swimming for a long time and then, when I began again, only with ear plugs and extreme caution.