Swimming as Clarity

The Urban Swimmer at the Clapham Leisure Centre.

If only real life was an Architect's drawing

Of late The Urban Swimmer has been having a clear out. Sorting through boxes of stuff, picking over books and asking "will I ever read or need this book again?" As a consequence TUS found himself in Clapham over the Easter break (one of the places he stores junk) and used this as an excuse (if one were needed) to visit the Clapham Leisure Centre.

Grey anyone?

It's been a good few years since TUS swam in Clapham. He remembers the old pool that was once here which had the look of a Victorian swimming bath.  Last year the baths were knocked down and now a spanking new leisure centre fills it's place. From the outside it looks like a bunch of large boxes, all squareness and glass. Inside is a nice broad 25m main pool and a small training pool. The facilities have a bunch of new fads. The changing room is a sort of open plan multi-gender affair with lots of cubicles, and the pool  apparently has some kind of weirdly exciting capacity to change depth with something called a moveable boom. Eh? Sadly TUS did not see this in action at the time of his visit. He hopes it doesn't go the way of all those unused luges filling the nations pools.

TUS visited over the Easter bank holiday, and while he was engaged in the physical clear out of debris, he was also involved in an intellectual and emotional one. These have been troubled times for the heart, but TUS was reminded once again of the recuperative power of water. In my last post I mentioned Roger Deakin's excellent book Waterlog. A book recalling a year or so swimming in various parts of the British Isles. TUS was reminded that in the opening chapter of Waterlog Deakin describes himself as "feeling sad at the end of a long love". Deakin too had read The Swimmer, and cites in it the origins of his book.

So it is the water seems to absorb and cleanse the emotionally distracted swimmer. In the stroke and the regulation of breath one finds routine, the needs of lungs, muscle, blood, heart and bone  provide a return to the physical world from the torments of the psyche. However clouded the mind, there is no doubt that a few lengths did TUS the world of good. Perhaps just by throwing ourselves into the physical we drop to a lower level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but could there be something more soulful here? Baptism and the ritual of water appears to have existed from the earliest forms of Christianity, and Judaism uses the word  tevilah (טְבִילָה) for immersion in naturally sourced waters for ritual purification. From Old Testament floods to Hindus bathing in the Ganges it seems our view of water as cleanser of the soul is as ancient as civilised man. So why not do the same on a wet bank holiday in south London? Clapham may not be Babylon, but it will do.