There’s much to enjoy about the autumn months in the UK. Teenagers are restricted to school playgrounds rather than the high street between the hours of nine and three. Landlords in rural pubs start remembering that they have a fireplace that might be worth lighting. And provincial airports become populated with polite, cashmere-wearing pensioners on their way to the Azores, rather than gangs of stags and hens drinking the Wetherspoons dry at 7.30 a.m.
But there is a fly (or should that be waterborne parasite?) in the ointment. There was a time when there was no such thing as ‘wild swimming’. You just called it swimming outdoors. Or you didn’t call it anything at all – as you, quite rightly, didn’t think that going for the odd al fresco dip should become a replacement for developing a personality all of your own. But something changed. And, much as self-proclaimed ‘wild swimmers’ are terrific bores all year round, they reach their apex of smugness as the colder months approach.
I have two ‘wild swimmer’ acquaintances. Both, you probably won’t be surprised to learn, have day-jobs that are the very definition of ‘overpaid corporate grunt work masquerading as creative endeavour’ in the PR and advertising realms. These are exactly the types of people who are drawn, like angry swans towards a breadcrumb-donating child on a riverbank, into the world of wild swimming.
The word ‘wild’ is in danger of being abused as much as ‘luxury’ and ‘organic’. When I think of ‘wild’, I think of people engaging in something that I will always be far too cowardly to ever undertake myself. Skiing across Greenland solo, for example, or camping on a Siberian mountainside for 14 weeks to catch a glimpse of a snow leopard. Wild, to me at least, does not translate as getting a bit cold while paddling in a brook in Monmouthshire in October. But perhaps my definition of ‘wild’ is old fashioned. Wild swimmers have altered the algorithm so that, in their world, the adjective translates into smug, highly boring narcissists getting high on their own virtuousness.
September is the cruellest month in this regard. As the temperatures of our streams and rivers plummet, the self-regarding competitive masochism of the wild swimmer reaches ecstatic proportions. ‘It was only eight degrees – but I did it. It was fun!’ is a common brag among this bizarre fraternity when they meet on terra firma. The wild swimmer is convinced that their leisure pursuit is the eco-pure equivalent of Shin Bet operatives making clandestine, highly dangerous incursions into the Gaza Strip. In reality, this behaviour is more of a Mobius strip of one-sided conversational tedium, baffling in both its parsimony and its sheer bloody length.
The wild swimmer is convinced that their leisure pursuit is the eco-pure equivalent of Shin Bet operatives making clandestine, highly dangerous incursions into the Gaza Strip
It’s axiomatic of course that ‘wild swimmers’ are people who have never done anything truly wild in their lives. But their prominence has got me thinking as to how much further we can beat down on the word. If I go to a branch of Iceland and stick my hand in a freezer cabinet until it goes numb, am I now ‘wild shopping’? If I sit in a beer garden in a T-shirt until I start to shiver, am I ‘wild drinking’? No. I’m just an idiot.
Before you accuse me of knocking something I’ve never tried, please let me take you back to the 1980s: the era of my childhood where plunging into streams and rivers was entirely normal. Even as an adult, I’ve ‘wild swum’ in the past 12 months. The difference was that, until now, I didn’t describe it as such, and I certainly didn’t measure the temperature of the water before pretending that what I was doing somehow made me a purer and more stoic individual than someone who takes the (entirely reasonable) route of just using the pool at their local leisure centre.
Wild swimming is just being cold and wet for Guardian readers. And the smug pretence that’s concomitant with this activity is becoming a serious irritation for anyone who believes anecdotes should consist of more than someone telling you how they spent a day sitting in a stream near King’s Lynn before cycling off to eat some hummus in a tent. As the joke goes: ‘How can you tell a wild swimmer from someone who has never wild swum?’ Answer: ‘Don’t worry – they will definitely tell you.’
Wild swimmers are the most boring people in Britain if you’re unfortunate enough to get cornered by one or more of them. Like an even more irritating version of intersectionality warriors or Jordan Peterson acolytes, they have appropriated a position or cause to get more than their fair share of attention. This, as the late Sean Lock brilliantly commented, is ‘attention they can’t get from their personality or achievements in life’.
Taking a swim in the cold outdoors is not an innately wrong or stupid thing to do (unless you’re the a pair of tourists from the UK who this week got banned from Venice after they were caught swimming in the Grand Canal). But wild swimmers have done their level best to make me think that it absolutely is. For something that is supposed to be so pure and virtuous, the results are a form of fast-spreading pollution that even Thames Water’s sewage outflow pipes would struggle to compete with.
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