by Tom Cox
I sometimes kid myself that I have accrued some hard-won wisdom in my four decades on the planet and learned from my mistakes, but at other times it’s clear that’s not true. I have burned my mouth on pizza innumerable times due to being too eager to bite into it, but I still burn my mouth on pizza due to being too eager to bite into it. I have sustained innumerable cuts, splinters and blisters from walking barefoot outside, but I still walk barefoot outside. As I walked out of the top of Not Jenny’s Cove for the third time in a week and along a fallopian tube footpath back to my car, I thought about a BBC documentary I’d recently watched celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Summer of Love, in which Eric Burdon from The Animals got irrationally angry at the preponderance of hippie girls with dirty feet during the late sixties. If Eric Burdon from The Animals had seen my feet now, he’d have been livid. A lot of people can get livid if you talk about the pleasure of walking barefoot, how it puts you more in touch with the earth and where you come from. They think it is whimsical hippie drivel, but that’s probably because they’ve never tried it and because they live in a reinforced box of steel rage, self-built on a strong foundation of sneering joylessness. This is a problem with a lot of modern attitudes to the pursuit of being in and respecting nature: they’re easily written off as mystic nonsense, and in the long term, nature suffers as a result of that. Mystic nonsense does exist, of course – there is no denying that. The fine line between mystic nonsense and bona fide, near-hallucinatory earth-based wonder is one of life’s most fascinating tightropes to walk: it’s a place where you can learn a lot about yourself, and possibly even make a great double concept LP with an excellent gatefold sleeve design at the same time. The 1960s probably wouldn’t have existed without it.
What was definitely whimsical drivel was the paragraph of ellipsis-heavy prose on the coconut-flavoured bath and shower gel my parents left in my bathroom after their visit. ‘I’m going to a faraway place she said,’ began the coconut-flavour bath and shower gel bottle, ‘… just for a while … her toes wriggled in the warm sand and a silly seagull laughed and danced in the sweet wind.’
‘What on earth did you buy that for?’ I asked my mum.
‘It’s your dad,’ she replied. ‘He never looks properly at anything he picks off the shelf when he does the shopping.’
I am not into this recent trend of needy bath products cosying up to you and telling you about their day, so I normally prefer an old-fashioned soap bar, but I didn’t want to let the coconut bath and shower gel go to waste so after I’d been to Not Jenny’s Cove yet again, I lathered up my body with it. Afterwards I inspected my feet and legs. Following four days of swimming and barefoot walking my skin was a latticework of cuts and stings, most of which I’d not noticed when they occurred. On my ankle I saw the entry wound of a long thin creature I’d picked out of it earlier: some kind of sand tick, totally new to me. Above it: two horsefly bites, three flea bites, a few more bites from various small insects. Below all of this, a graffiti of cuts on my feet, which sea salt had already gone some way towards healing. With my body all clean and fresh, it would have been ridiculous to walk straight down to the river and throw myself in and get all dirty again, so I walked straight down to the river and threw myself in and got all dirty again.
I tried to learn from the technique of teenagers I watched jump into a deep patch from a high tree, the way they made their bodies sharp and long in order to hit the water with the least impact. I resolved to do the same, from the rocks next to my favourite pool on the moor, tomorrow. I swam alongside an Egyptian goose, up to a weir, keeping exact pace with it. I walked home barefoot, following the river south as the sun dipped behind the trees on the opposite bank. I shivered a bit and bumped into my friend Emily on the way. She told me that when her Scottish gran would see her or her brothers shivering after swimming she’d give them what she called a ‘shivery biscuit’.
‘What’s one of those?’ I asked.
‘It’s a biscuit, for when you’re shivery,’ Emily said.
I had entered a new kind of swimming addict’s waking dream state. A swirling, multicolour tunnel of swim, never quite ceasing. The way my skin felt from the water was electrifying and, as the sun got hotter, I wanted more. Each night I would go to bed physically exhausted, thinking, ‘OK, that’s enough. Give your body a rest tomorrow. You must get back to work.’ Each morning I would wake up, see more great weather, and ask myself, ‘OK, what shall I do now?’ then answer, ‘I know: let’s go swimming!’ Sometimes I swam in other coves, including a couple of hard-to-reach inlets in Cornwall, where the sea was greener. My hair felt different after swimming in these to the way it did after swimming in Not Jenny’s Cove: greener, somehow. My seventh day of swimming was the hottest yet. I returned to Not Jenny’s Cove and, as I swam, I thought about how the vastness of the sea is so ominous, but also how the same vastness can serve to dilute danger in our minds. I’m fairly relaxed about having most crawling or slimy or tentacled or pincered creatures near or even on my body but, at the same time, when I swim in the sea there’s a delusion at work. My mum and dad found the catshark close to here, which meant there was a good chance at least one catshark lurked beneath me right now, as I swam, but when I swim I am never thinking ‘I bet there are several catsharks here, right next to me’. It’s the same kind of delusion that lets us block out suffering – of people, of animals. There is just so much of it. If we thought about all of it, we couldn’t live. The size of the world dilutes it, enabling us to cope. That caterpillar I moved from the coastal path was another example. ‘But why bother?’ you might say. ‘What about all the other caterpillars on the coastal path this week that you can’t save, that people will probably tread on? What about all the insects you’ve trodden on without realising?’ And you’d be right. But I don’t think that’s a reason not to bother. You should still be as nice as possible to insects. You should still go to the polling station and vote. Your tiny part of the ocean, or the drop you make in it as you opt out, counts.
Spending a lot of time in the sea has also made me much more aware of the damage we are doing to it. By saying this, I am not saying I swim in the sea and see fragments of plastic floating all around me; I am saying that if you’re submerged in the sea frequently, you get a greater awareness of its importance – how much more important it is than you – and that makes you think about the vast ways in which we have abused it, just to make our lives fractionally more convenient. A bin isn’t a magic portal that makes rubbish vanish forever, as many of us seemed to believe it was for much of the twentieth century. I had become conscientious about recycling before I swam a lot; now I’m pedantic about it. I avoid plastic where I can, would like to work towards avoiding it totally, and I have a metal water canister that I take everywhere. We can’t be perfect, and so much terrifying, unrepairable damage is already done, but we can try so much harder than we have been doing for the last several decades. Not long after dawn on a Saturday morning earlier in 2017, I had arrived at the Thurlestone Sands Beach, ten miles west of Not Jenny’s Cove, and began – with the help of two people named Penny, and nobody else – to clean the beach. I felt that the Penny who was in charge had given me, herself and the Penny who wasn’t in charge a very easy beach to clean. Was there even any litter on it? As I began to venture out with my litter picker and old empty compost bag, however, I gradually began to attune my eyes to all the tiny fragments of plastic, the countless bottle bits and bottle tops and strips of crisp packet, to distinguish corporate detritus from seaweed. It felt like gradually peeling back a layer of faux reality. It made me, too, more conscious of the seaweed itself: the myriad different types that you originally thought merely two or three. By the end, we had filled five entire sacks to the brim with litter. And I had decided, as I always do, but even more than ever, that anyone who bags up their dog’s shit then abandons it in any part of the countryside, coastal or inland, should be fitted with some kind of electronic ankle tag that prevents them from ever going anyw
here even vaguely attractive ever again.
Of course, our brains aren’t designed to take it all in: the world’s rubbish, the world’s danger, the world’s suffering. Our vision of our environment isn’t clear, and that’s a survival technique. But it also stops us seeing a lot of magic, right in front of us. In The Doors of Perception, his famous 1954 essay about mind-altering drugs, Aldous Huxley talks about the interfering neurotic within us – the one Huxley left behind when he sampled mescaline and began to see through the door in the wall. I’m far from the first to note that there’s something very narcotic, very trance-like, about swimming – not just in the deep liquid calm of the act itself, but in what it enables you to see in a wider sense. Since swimming a lot – since not just swimming, but pushing myself as a swimmer, through that door where swimming becomes harder then much easier – I have felt like some Vaseline has been wiped off my lens. There is so much that I see in a more honest, present way than I did before: my own weaknesses and strengths, the true obscured agendas – positive and negative – behind my own behaviour and the behaviour of others, the distinction between how I want to spend my time and how some intangible societal pressure has made me think I want to spend my time. The wonder of a wild acrobatic bird feasting on some seed you put out for it two minutes earlier. The undersong of woodland on a bright spring day. Music.
‘I swam two lengths of the sea today,’ I would often say, on returning from the cove. I tried to be thorough each time and make sure I touched the rocks at each end. I like breaking rules but I hate cheating. On that last day of addictive swimming in 2017 – a period when swimming took on a new narcotic meaning for me, a period I would repeat in the summer of 2018, even more addictively – I swam four lengths of the sea. It was only as I got out onto the shingle and my knees buckled beneath me that I truly registered how tired I was. This little dream period could not last. I’d already pushed my luck. The weather was expected to break soon. Tomorrow I needed to become a responsible adult again. When I got home my friend Charlie got in touch to say she had tomorrow off work and fancied getting the train down to Devon from Bristol and going swimming. I told her in no uncertain terms I had to have a day of writing and catching up on jobs and couldn’t join her. An hour later I sent her a second message. ‘Fuck it,’ it said. ‘Let’s swim!’
After my hectic social period, I’d had the period of solitude I needed. The one time I had not been alone during my swims was at Talland Bay in Cornwall when a muscular, heavily tattooed holidaying man from Frome had followed me out over the rocks in my attempt to reach a small remote cove that had been rendered even more remote due to the closure of part of the coast path. We hurdled and climbed stone together for half a mile, until we reached a sheer twenty-foot wall of slate and I let him go on alone, swimming into an inlet – gazpacho to the cloudy lemonade of Not Jenny’s Cove – and watching as he waved and cheered to me from a distant pinnacle, having reached his destination. Besides that, I’d been largely alone for a whole week. ‘Yes, I’ve done a lot of swimming, but I haven’t done any social swimming, and I deserve that,’ I told myself. You can argue a case for how deserving you are of any treat, if you approach it from the right angle.
I picked Charlie up from the train station in the later part of the morning and we drove to the moor, walking several miles through orange-and green-speckled woodland and swimming in two natural pools. We leapt off high rocks, javelin-style, and, in order to get photographs of us doing this from the best angle, I waded across the river with the water at chest height, balancing on slimy rocks and holding my camera precariously aloft. We walked back to the car with tingling skin, chatting relentlessly. I noticed how open our conversation was, inadvertently so. It was as if the water had varnished us in truth. The door in the wall was wide open.
Afterwards, at home, I glanced down at my right leg and noticed a tick feasting on my blood, just above my knee. I was going to try to remove it myself with tweezers but it was in quite an awkward spot and Charlie suggested it might be more sensible to let a doctor do the job. I decided she was right, remembering the night at the end of the previous summer, after a moorland adventure, when I’d woken up in pain and found a much larger, angrier purple tick in the back of my knee. I’d attempted to get that tick out but had left the head in, ultimately requiring the nurse at my local GP’s to hack into the back of my leg and make a fair mess of it in a procedure that lasted twenty minutes or more. It was more painful than another tick a nurse had once removed from my nipple, but only by a slim margin.
The doctor’s surgery was closed but Charlie and I headed to the minor injury unit at the nearby Community Hospital, in the bathroom of which I located six more ticks, on various other parts of my lower body. The receptionist told me there’d been a lot of it going on today. Charlie, by contrast, had zero ticks. The doctor, perhaps due to recently having removed so many ticks attached to other buffoons who walked around Dartmoor in swimming trunks, was short-tempered. I’d estimate he was about four years my junior but he talked to me as if I were a naughty child who had spent too long outside playing – which, in a way, was exactly what I was. As he teased arachnids out of my thighs, ankles and right buttock with a small plastic implement, I tried to lighten the atmosphere by asking questions about ticks. ‘Are they easier to get out when they’re a bit bigger than this?’ I began to ask, but he cut me off after three words. ‘Are they easier WHAT? Are they easier WHAT?’ he said. I thought fondly back to the time when I was young, my body wasn’t riddled with parasites and I perceived doctors as kind, reassuring figures who didn’t hate me. He calmed down once he’d killed the final tick and told me about his visits to the vet with his cat and his wife, whenever his cat picked up a tick, which the doctor said was the only time they ever argued. I assumed he meant the only time he and his wife argued, not the only time he and his cat argued. ‘But we get it done, and then – hey presto! – happy marriage again,’ he said. I watched the doctor’s tick-removal technique quite carefully and he gave me a tick remover as a going home present, which meant that when at around 8 p.m. I found one extra tick attached to my left testicle, I could remove it myself with a fair amount of precision. By this point Charlie – mercifully for her – had left.
Earlier that day, I’d said something on the Internet about insects, asking people to be kind to them. When I’d said it I’d arrogantly imagined insects looking at it and thinking, ‘Look at this guy. I like him. He is cool. He’s on our side.’ But that probably wasn’t true. Insects probably viewed my statement in the same way as I’d viewed the bottle of needy coconut bath gel. They didn’t need anyone cosying up to them and trying to be their friend; they just wanted to get on with the practical business of the day. Thinking ahead to the next few days when I would be checking thoroughly for signs of Lyme disease, I reminded myself not to patronise insects in the future. But it felt nice to be tick-free and have a body that, while far from perfect, was tanned and strong from all the sun and exercise. Officially you’re not supposed to be aware of your body when you are a man but I have noticed that all the times I’ve been most aware of my body have been when it has felt nicest to live inside.
I stood barefoot on the lawn, on this final evening of astonishing weather, in the failing light. The grass needed a cut and was getting a little damp under my toes. I felt very conscious of it, very much inside myself and inside summer, 2017, rather than anywhere else. I could still sense the wood inside my foot, but not in a majorly problematic way. I considered checking on the catshark but instead decided to trust that smaller creatures were doing their job on it and didn’t need any extra supervision. It was bio-degradable, despite certain signs otherwise. It made me think for the first time in years of another sea creature: a large plaice someone had mysteriously left on the side of the A6002 in Nottingham, in 1989, not far from Bilborough College – which, as anyone who has visited the area would no doubt agree, is no place for a big fish to hang out, dead or alive. There was a drought that summer and, in t
he ever-increasing heat, the plaice gave off such a stink that it would make my dad and I squint as we drove past it at fifty miles per hour with the windows open. ‘THAT FOOKIN’ PLAICE IS STILL THERE,’ my dad would tell my mum, when we got home. We must have driven past it six times a week for three months and, each time, it got an infinitesimal bit smaller, but it was an amazingly resilient plaice: the deceased fish equivalent of Bruce Springsteen playing one of his concerts. ‘This is crazy,’ you’d think, seeing it again. ‘Just how long can this fish keep going? Its stamina is amazing.’ Then it would keep going some more, its reek not diminishing. Greyer each day, it clung on fiercely to the tarmac. Then, finally, the rain came, and it was gone, its final fragments dispersed into the huge world.
NEARLY NORTHERN
(2017–18)
‘Where are you from?’ said my mum. The two of us were talking about the North, as a concept, but also as a weather system and a place where people can sometimes live, out of choice. We’d been remembering the time during the 1980s when she and my dad and I and their friends Malcolm and Cheryl went on holiday to Dentdale in Cumbria and the bedsheets in the cottage where we stayed developed icicles and one night everyone watched my head slowly descend until I fell asleep with my face in my dinner, which happened because I was so tired from walking so far through the snow during the day. Even after all these years I could visualise how cold it was during that holiday, a cold that made you have to try really hard not to cry when you were six – and probably also when you were thirty-one – and these recollections reminded me that the North is a place suited to people with wintry skin and bones, whereas I am biologically constructed to be at my best in regions where lizards are at theirs. But I had also told my mum that I sometimes fancied living in the North since – with exceptions, of course, just as there are exceptions everywhere – I thought of it as friendly, and a bit like home, even though I had only lived in the proper bit of it once, many years ago, for a few months, in York, which many might not regard as hardcore northern living. There was so much of the North I was yet to explore, I said, and I also sometimes felt a desire to be back closer to where I was from. Which was what prompted my mum to ask where I was from.