I am really boring about wild swimming (and I think you may be too)
Outdoor swimming didn’t make me boring, it just gave me something with which to bore people.
Like many people, outdoor swimming (see how I skirt around the much-mocked word ‘wild’) seemed to leap from hobby to interest to obsession almost at once. I don’t recall having quite the same problem with badminton.
To my credit, and possibly yours, we are at least conscious of — as well as complicit in — our brainwashing. There are probably no other cult leaders quite so benevolent as Roger Deakin, but he is a cult leader, and a darned effective one, nonetheless.
I think it shows great maturity, even good grace, for me to admit that I have given my heart and mind, and a good deal of my time, away to something that is now beyond my control. The problem, he said cultishly, is not the swimming itself — it’s the talking about swimming.
It is an odd and unsettling moment to hear yourself boring other people. It is one an outdoor swimmer experiences frequently. Either that or they are oblivious to how dull they have become on this particular topic and, in a way, it is these people I envy the most.
I am told, I ‘go on’ about outdoor swimming a great deal. This is by the people who know and love and largely tolerate me. Can you imagine the impression I must make on the total strangers I am wilfully numbing?
Roger, of course, would also ‘go on’ about outdoor swimming. The difference in standards is subtle but important. He was a beloved naturalist and rural eccentric. I am a copywriter and a lecturer, my brand is selling probiotic yoghurt and using the wrong sort of pen to write on the whiteboard.
Like most personality defects it is worse to be aware of it than to inflict it unknowingly. Some days I feel as if I’m living in the Gene Wilder ‘oh really, tell me more’ meme.
But seeing as I’m incapable of giving up swimming — and therefore incapable of giving up talking about it — I wanted to at least understand why the joy of the experience simply does not translate in the account.
I believe it was a philosophical, yet quirky, coffee mug that once told me ‘the secret of being a bore is to tell everything’. I reflected on the wisdom of this crockery, and while I don’t think I’m guilty of telling everything about my swimming experiences, I do tell more than is necessary — and far more than is desired.
There’s a theory by Stephen King, that the stories that get put aside and regarded as boring become so when the writer is ‘enchanted with his powers of description’ and loses sight of the momentum and direction of the tale. If I listen too closely to my own recounting of swims, it’s not that I lose sight of the story but that there never was one to begin with.
My swim ‘stories’ are just fragments of observation and ham-fisted attempts to evoke the sensation of the water to those who are clothed and dry and warm and deeply uninterested. Swimming is not boring, but I tell it boringly.
Rather than weaving a captivating tale of a strange new frog-eyed world, or keeping my mouth shut, I machine-gun out the platitudes and motivational chestnuts that all right-thinking human beings are able to dismiss as fluff.
Swimming is inspiring, it frees me from my worries, it stimulates my creativity, it allows me to see life in a new way. All of this is true and, to me at least, important. But, as tales from the deep go, it is desperately shallow.
The truth is that I am a zealot, and nobody has ever been jealous of the zealous. When I innocently divert an unrelated conversation to the topic of outdoor swimming (a subject I could not allow to go neglected for more than twenty minutes) I might as well be wandering down a crowded street in flippers and goggles, ringing a bell and solemnly chanting passages from Waterlog.
Like all competent hypocrites, I too find some people’s swimming accounts to be horribly dull. The training triathletes, for example, who rattle to and fro, with their heads down and their activity trackers pinging, seeing the world through the frosted lenses of their fifty-quid goggles as if everything were just one great lane. I don’t get it, and because I don’t get it, I roll my eyes and tut and do all the things that I inspire in the people who don’t get my version of ‘it’.
But to be put off by somebody else’s obsession does not render my own any less off-putting. And while I may be honest about the depth of my boringness, and evenly share the responsibility for it with Roger Deakin, there’s not much I can, or intend to, do about it. Perhaps I simply want to awaken some of you to the possibility that the thing you love and cherish is making you slightly less cherishable to those around you. Not because that would do you any favours necessarily, but because an icy pond feels less daunting when you all plunge in together.
And so I swim on as those around me nod off. To take, and then mangle, the words of Dylan Thomas: somebody’s boring me about swimming. I think it’s me.
I have written a book about copywriting and I shall be able to afford new trunks if you buy it.
