Last Swim in the Lake

It has been cold recently so as I walked to the lake I wondered if it would be my last open water swim without a wetsuit for the year. 

As it happened it was a windless 16C and not as much as a wavelet to disturb the glassy surface. After I strode in, ripples rolled away like an LP record expanding outwards heading for the other end 400m away. I leant back into the water and tasted the clean cool water, a shock that never fails to remind me of Stamford Hall swimming pool where we used to go as  children,  

There are three swans there now in a family group and they watched me suspiciously as I quietly swam up to the dead tree into the sunset. The sky was a deep blue changing to a silvery yellow, with all shades in between, so each little LP groove reflected one colour of the sky above me, making a kaleidoscope of lines in front of me towards across the setting sun. 

I turned around and swam into the shore again and the water had turned to impenitrable jet black. It glinted a little and reminded me of the lump of obsidian...volcanic glass... that I have at home from an ancient eruption which had vitrified as it captured the dense smoke of the explosions. It's utterly pitch dark but can be cut into shards for jewellery or for surgery. They make obsidian knives for surgeons that are even sharper than stainless steel. It felt like swimming in black velvet guinness.

But even though there was no wind at all there was one hell of a clatter going over on in the surrounding lakes. Every water fowl in creation seemed to have something to say tonight. 

I suppose Bill Oddy would say "They are preparing for their long flight to the Galapagos Islands" or something like that. But I met a man with a gun who told me he was going to shoot a duck for his tea and explained that they were only on their way to Langtoft lakes where they would stay the winter, a distance of just 4 miles. 

I have seen the man before and like him. He seems as if he might be a gypsy and once when I admitted to ignoring the stay-out signs, had said "It doesn't belong to them anyways" which is a contemporary memory, even today, of the 18th century land enclosures where the local farmer-politicians voted themselves the common land, and then enclosed it for themselves. 

These times were set in poetry by John Clare at the time and resound, even now hereabouts, as he lived only a mile away in Helpston.

I got out not in the least cold and dried off as the sun set, shining pink on the opposite reeds where the swans still circled eyeing me up. I went over to the pub still wet and talked again to the farmer, whom I told one time 'I had met a man with a gun on the bridleway.'

"Oh that's OK. By the lakes there you say? Did you know there's an old bloke who goes down to swim every day there?"

"Must be crackers. I bet its not  half cold" I had replied.