In Waterlog, Roger Deakin, the late, great nature writer, documents his liquid journey around Britain: an attempt to discover the country afresh by swimming through its seas, rivers, lakes, fens; its swimming pools and secret bathing holes; its canals (even). He writes: "The more I thought about it, the more obsessed I became with the idea of a swimming journey. I started to dream ever more exclusively of water. Swimming and dreaming were becoming indistinguishable. I grew convinced that following water, flowing with it, would be a way of getting under the skin of things, of learning something new." He begins his quest, as he comes to think of it, in the moat of his own old house in Suffolk, breaststroking through a thunderstorm, experiencing a "frog's eye view of rain on the moat" and watching each raindrop as it "exploded in a momentary, bouncing fountain that turned into a bubble and burst".
His journey takes him to icy riverine pools in Devon and Wales, to village lidos and the lodes of Norfolk, via London's Hampstead ponds and the bays of the Isles of Scilly. He maps Britain through its capillary network of streams and rivers, and encounters it in a new way: immersing himself in a rich aquatic life of fish, amphibians, birds and mammals. The book is also an account of those he meets along the way, from the unfriendly school officials who despatch him, dripping, from the river Itchen at Winchester College, to an extraordinary vignette of a fenland eel-man.
I have spent two months of this summer working on a book, travelling Britain seeking out its Roman ruins and monuments: a less watery quest than Deakin's. There has been a little, though not much, swimming along the way (heart-stoppingly icy dips in the North Sea, a salty, weed-tugged swim at Broadstairs). Returning to London and the library, there have been some morning lengths in Hackney Fields lido, but the drenchings have been more about being caught in intense, summer-evening downpours. I myself am a "game" rather than a keen swimmer, but that is not the point. What's so attractive about Deakin's book, and what makes it such a wonderful travelling companion, is – apart from its pin-sharp descriptions and deep humanity – its subversiveness. This act of swimming in the wild, away from "health and safety", unsupervised, often unobserved, is, in some essential way, a quiet act of defiance.
