Swimming With The Fishes

Photo by Jo Sinclair

The air is thick with chaff. It smells of wheat. I once held my breath and galloped through the dust cloud churning out of a combine harvester. My childhood friends and I used to wait excitedly for the combines to come. It meant free rein to charge across the fields once the harvest was in. Tractor tracks in East Anglia's prairie fields made perfect lanes to race along on horseback, stretching far off into the horizon as long as the summer holidays. But flames soon licked at our heels; stubble burning ignited the countryside until it was banned in 1993, and ploughs turning gold into black always came too soon, like those annoying 'Back To School!' banners in shop windows.

I went swimming last week with one of these childhood friends. I called and found her in charge of children - her own and others'. She'd decided to take them to the river in the water meadows near her home in Suffolk. It was the third time in a week I'd had a 'wild swim' - in the River Granta, the North Sea and the River Stour, all cool but not too cold. It has been such a lovely summer I've taken to carrying swimsuit and towel - and a copy of Roger Deakin's Waterlog at all times.

There's something about the change of perspective that makes swimming so special. Floating on my back smiling at my painted toenails and looking towards the grey green horizon of the North Sea. Treading water among flowing weeds in the Granta at Grantchester looking at damselflies and water lilies, waiting for a kingfisher. Laughing kids, dogs and brown cows on the banks in quintessential Constable country. Pale limbs pass through cool green ripples. Immersed in water I get that rare feeling that I'm not observing nature; I am nature.