Little More...

Two Hours in Kidderminster

I am sitting underneath a pair of knickers. We have just done our washing at the local launderette in Kidderminster and hung it up to dry in the boat. Now before you get carried away imagining a neatly stacked clothes horse rising elegantly from the floor in all its concertina glory, I am going to have to disappoint. Wash day on Little More is about as tidy and elegant as a drunkard on a bouncy castle. You don't get two duvet covers, assorted towels and sheets, T-shirts and jeans and the aforementioned pants dry on a single clothes horse. Nah, you're going to want some string: tie it to the hand rails outside and run it longways along the inside of the boat, securing it on the handrails right out at the other end. Zig zag it through windows so it cuts across the kitchen and living room. Keep going until you run out either of space, string or the will to live, leaving the boat looking a little like seven balls of string are in the throes of a particularly intense and satisfying string-orgy. Then hang stuff off it (it likes that, the kinky string) and sit outside for two days and wait for it to dry. Or, if it is raining, crumple yourself up tiny and sit inside underneath something small that your head won't keep bashing. Like a pair of knickers.

Some would say that this sounds a bit more trouble than its worth. I say to them: you haven't sniffed us after three weeks without a launderette, mate.

Anyway, we're off; Kidderminster is a town ruined by roads. It looks like a large animal with its entrails hanging out. The people all sound like me and are very friendly – especially the lady in the “Forest Wash” laundrette, an establishment jauntily hung with all manner of plastic vegetation, principally ivy. I half expected the band Tight Fit to burst out of the staff room to sing The Lion Sleeps Tonight as our socks rotated in rhythm. I was very tempted to wait it out and see if they did; I have a bit of a thing about launderettes that I may or may not write about sometime. It's not a problem or anything.

Loads of beards here too...

Not Made of Sugar

Drenched? I was bloody soaked. Wringing wet like a school blazer floating in the Rochdale canal. It got to the point on Friday where, standing at the tiller steering us towards Kinver, I could actually feel my boots filling with water. If my feet could have imagined they were in a film, it would have been the Posiedon Adventure. Except they, unlike Gene Hackman in his white draylon polo-neck, were making no attempt to escape a total drowning. They just sat there – or stood rather - in my boots, taking it on the chin. As it were.

Despite, or even because of the Biblical flood happening in my footwear, I was having a magical time on this particular morning. The downpour started just as we were queueing to go into the brilliantly named Rocky Lock (I dearly hope it was named for the legendary halfwitted Apollo-Creed-mashing boxing champ rather than the fact hat it had been cut out of some big rocks). The rain was sly at first, spitting little spots when it thought you weren't looking. Then, as if realising it was not getting your attention it intensified a little, rhythmically pressing its weight behind the falling drops before going back to a nonchalant sort of spitting; the rainfall equivalent of a ne'er do well shoving his hands in his pockets and whistling up into the air just after he's scratched someone's car or thrown something at a cat. Instead of ducking inside like a sensible person, I gamely steered the boat into Rocky Lock despite the polite but clearly made protestations of Al who, like a cat, hates to get wet especially if there is a nice dry boat he can sit in. His logic became somewhat less refutable to me as the skies suddenly decided they couldn't be arsed with playing it coy and promptly opened themselves onto our heads. As I stood over the lock, laboriously winding up the paddles for the sluices it occurred to me that I might be drier if I just jumped into the canal. It was far from unpleasant, though, being rained on so hard that my head felt like a keyboard being pressed into service by a champion touch-typist in a bad mood. There was no wind to chill the bones and the water itself was not cold. I quite liked it, it felt a little like being very small again.

Alan on the other hand was not quite getting the same enjoyment from the experience. The rain had soaked his woolly hat so that the usually jaunty pom-poms on it were drooping disappointedly, making the whole hat seem to frown along with its owner. The heavy drippage from his hat, hair, beard, coat and shorts made it look as though Alan was melting like a colourful but despondent snowman. The lock navigated, we only needed one person on deck so I cheerily volunteered to stay out and steer. Alan cheerily went to sit in a nice dry boat.

Then the rain decided it was time to see just how much of itself it could throw at the ground in fifteen minutes. The answer is a shitload. The drops were so big they bounced triumphantly off everything, including the roof of the boat which they thwacked with such relentless sibilant force that they exploded into thousands of tiny droplets several inches above where they landed. The boat developed a three inch thick halo of droplet-mist that blurred its edges making it look like it was in soft focus. Visibility was bad and became decidedly worse when the cheery smoke from the fire that Al was so kindly making inside the boat emerged from the chimney and blew straight into my face. All around me trees were bowed under the weight of the downpour. The rain hit the canal hard too, pocking it with craters that were endlessly renewed before the water surface could heal itself again. I began to feel my jeans being sucked onto my legs, clinging to me, slippery and chilly. It was also about this time I began to feel my boots taking on water like a wrecked ship. No other idiot was standing about in this. Even the ducks were giving any stretch of canal without tree cover a wide berth.

I however was grinning like a happy lunatic. The weather – crappy in the extreme on the one hand – was, on the other hand making the world look gorgeous. The drenched dark green leaf canopy glossy and vibrant, the rain-mist rising around a guelder rose tree, is leaves turning an outrageous autumn red, the silvery canal surface polka dotted with raindrops, the boat looking all shiny and clean for once. It was wonderful.

I think I need to get to a city quick and get a bit of my cynicism back...

Any Country Lane

Walking along a country lane in north Staffordshire yesterday morning, I was confronted with a shocking sight. It was a bright, shiny morning with a glimmering promise of afternoon heat in the September sky and the smell of newly cut hedgerow tickled our nostrils awake. We were on our way, on foot, to the town of Newport in Shropshire about 5 miles away to get a new handlebar stem for Alan's bicycle. The old one had met is end in a lock gate out of Audlem a few days earlier: I had been bleary eyed and at the tiller when, uncharacteristically, I had failed to pull off one of my legendarily smooth virtuoso-lock-entrances and clipped the side of the boat just enough to cause the bikes to grind across the roof. Their groans sounded like a metallic cry of “Oh no, not again”, briskly ended by a nice clean “snap” as Alan's handlebars were unfussily decapitated from their frame.

So we were bikeless this particular morning, and padding along a country lane, eating damsons off the trees, feeling a bit like two of the Famous Five in an Enid Blyton book. Then suddenly up ahead I see what I take, naturally, to be a small bear trying to nose its way into a hedgerow. I put on my glasses. It still looked like a small bear; big, broad furry arse, stocky legs and blunt ended paws with generously sized claws. And it still looked as though it were trying to force its way into the ground below the hedgerow. This is a strange thing for any bear to be doing, granted, especially since this particular bear seemed to have temporarily forgotten that its best burrowing tools were its flat, clawed paws and seemed instead to be attempting to dig using the top of its head. The bear appeared to be somehow levitating its hind legs above the ground, and was holding this unlikely position with such poise and skill that I could see no movement coming from it at all, not even breathing. The bear was dead. No wonder it hadn't scuttled off in fright as Alan and I crunched our was down the gravelled road towards it. Two more steps and I could see that it wasn't a bear at all. Of course, all along I had known that it wasn't a bear, but seeing the white and black stripes on the head of this thickly furred, stocky, dark brown creature made what I was seeing become suddenly real, like that feeling just at the top of a roller-coaster: All the way up the slow track to the summit you know that what you will be looking at is a very big drop that may not, but probably will reunite you with the ice cream, blue candy-floss and jar of unidentifiable “pebble” sweets you ate earlier. Nevertheless, you make animated conversation with your mum or sister or friend all the way up because you don't really want to give thought to what is going to happen. As I approached the badger, this remarkably large and luxuriant creature lying unceremoniously dead in a hedge by a roadside, its hind legs stiff with rigor mortis and sticking up in the air like an obscenity, the sight sent me over the summit, leaving my tummy behind. Though stiffened and awkward, the badger lay there with no lack of grace. Its fur was sleek and shone in the morning sun, its sheer physical bulk imposing, surprising, marking the space the creature once occupied in the everyday of this world. The sun-bleached seedheads of the grass bobbed playfully on its head as if just coaxing it would wake it up again. The body was still intact so death must have occurred the night before. The shock of seeing a dead animal has not diminished these last two months, although I have seen amongst others, an owl, squirrel, mole, water vole, rabbit, cat, sheep, pheasant and hare, countless other small birds, all dead. But this creature, so whole, so beautiful on such a perfect, golden-warm day seemed like an outrage.

I had been waiting as darkness fell on many nights to see a badger in the next field. Earlier this week Alan and I found a network of sets - the large, round holes in the ground with entrances scored by large claws could only have been badger residences. Finally I had seen one. And even though it was no longer alive, it had a majesty and beauty that somehow meant I was not sorry to have encountered it.

Spooky Cutting, Rock and Cobblers

Imagine a massive block of cheese.  Now imagine a massive block of cheese the colour and texture of a Cadbury's Flake bar.  Only, imagine it is purpley-brown rather than the more standard chocolatey brown of a Flake.  This purpley brown Flake-cheese you are imagining makes up the ground in this bit of Shropshire.  It goes on for miles; the crumbliest, flakiest ground cover in the land. Over a hundred years ago some bright spark decided to ignite a load of dynamite and blast a channel through a particularly annoying lumpy bit of the Flake-cheese.  It was annoying chiefly because the bright spark in question wanted to build a canal, and the lumpy bit (geologists call them 'hills' I believe) was squarely in the way.  Now if this person was such a bright spark, suggests Alan, then they would have just bunged a couple of locks in their canal and gone over the hill instead of exploding their way through it.  Good point.  Perhaps they'd sold out of locks down the shops. Or perhaps they were just living up to their nickname.  Whatever the reason, I am rather chuffed they decided to cut this two mile long, 15ft wide swathe through this lump of crumbly, cheesy-chocolate earth, because it is one of the spookiest paces I have ever been on any form of transport. 

Al and I entered Woodseaves Cutting, as this channel is known, at about 7 o'clock on Monday evening.  The spuds were in the oven baking away and the damson cobbler I'd knocked up last night was sitting on the stove.  The blobs of pastry had sunk pinkly into the blood red stew of damsons and sugar making it look like casseroled murder evidence.  We had left Market Drayton earlier in the day after stocking up at Netto on loo paper and chocolate digestives, two vital pieces of kit for any water-gypsy.  We had been loitering in the area for a while; on Friday we spoke to our old mates Andy and Chelle, and planned for them to pop down the following afternoon for a visit.  Chelle, for her part, is about as pregnant as you can get (her baby was due the next day) so some flexibility had to be built into this plan.  Andy worked out that he could get from us to the birthing pool at their house in an hour and a half, so the little blighter would have to be quicker than Zola Budd to beat them to it if Chelle's waters broke.  He signed off from the phone call with a priceless one: "So, tomorrow it's either canal or birth canal".  I laughed for a long time.

Saturday dawned and no baby so our visitors duly arrived with their three year old daughter Freya who, perhaps on finding the boat somewhat more to her scale, began immediately and very cutely to play house, promptly curling up in our bed whenever the excitement got too much for her.  It put me in mind of how my sister had reacted to the boat when she first saw it, exclaiming "It's like a Sindy-House!".  Now that is not exactly true.  As anyone whose Sindy owned a Town House in the mid-eighties will doubtless remember, the Town House had an exterior mock-wrought-iron lift (or "elevator" as the box exotically described it) between the three floors of her Luxurious Sindy Residence.  Little More has no such elevator, unfortunately.  But, like a doll's house it does have a minuscule shower.  Drop the soap and you will never retrieve it unless you happen to be one of those Yogis who can bend over and fold yourself neatly in three. 

But I digress.  After a lovely afternoon and the hugest pub lunch I have ever put away, we waved the Beacock family off; Andy in his funky leather jacket, Freya in her "Big Girl's Car Seat" and Chelle in her 40th week of pregnancy. (I still cannot believe she was so hardcore - I mean it was due the next day...the next day!)*  Alan and I then chugged back to Audlem to go to a gig in the village Scout and Guide Hall.  Rock, yes, and indeed roll.  French rolls actually, nice soft ones which were served with a lovely bowl of chilli at the gig for the bargainous price of £1.  As we ate, we and around fifty people from the village watched a series of local young bands have a pretty impressive go.  The gig was organised by a local thesp called Peter Marshall, a compact and bumptious man who had lived in Audlem for over two decades.  Straw mopped, clad in a purple tie-dye t-shirt with craggy blue eyes that brimmed with confidence and goodwill, Peter and his missus Jane had founded a theatre company based on a canal boat twenty years ago.  I had heard that they were based in Audlem and, in the spirit of trying to meet as many people as possible on this trip, I found their number on the web and decided I would phone them up at their house.  Luckily for me Peter Marshall was totally unflummoxed to have a total stranger ring him up at home to ask if he fancied a pint and a chinwag.  He didn't tell me to bugger off.  He didn't even say he had a lot to do in the next week which is the Almost-Polite way of saying bugger off.  He didn't hang up either, cutting out the middle man and just buggering off himself.  Instead he invited Alan and myself to his Chilli-Evening, which was conceived to give young bands in this impossibly out of the way rural area a bit of a bump-start.  Villagers of all ages, heights and widths milled around us, eating chilli and drinking booze brought from the local Co-op while bands containing their neighbours or children (some from the local Co-op – we were served by one the next day) played through proper amps on a little makeshift stage with proper disco lights.  It was a little like turning up at the wedding reception of someone you don't know but would probably like if you did.   The goodwill towards the players was palpable;  the door man kept coming over the tannoy urging us to eat more chilli, and to make sure we drop something into the collection bucket to go towards the bands.  It was a community not being cynical about its young people, and it was brilliant.

We had a long walk back along the towpath to our boat afterwards.  We are getting rather bold these days, walking confidently in the sort of darkness that would've made various parts of our anatomy contract tightly with fear before coming on this trip.  After being inspired by our friend Polly we are even eschewing the use of a torch on the long walks in the lampless darkness that you get on the towpath these days.  Perhaps this is why we were initially unperturbed when entering the narrow tree-enclosed channel of Woodseaves Cutting on our boat, just as the light was fading on Monday.  We were travelling East, into the dusk and as the Ash trees loomed we steered the boat into the shadows with the blasé attitude that only comes with forgetting how quickly dusk can turn into darkness.  The cutting was two and a half miles long, and at three miles an hour, that is a fair amount of driving time in the gathering gloom.  Problem was, we could not go at three miles an hour; the entrance to the cutting bore a sign with the very encouraging image of rocks tumbling down a slope into water and urged boaters, for their safety, to go at 2mph.  That'll be an hour in the cutting, then.  Til' 8 o'clock and near-twilight conditions in fact.  Add to that the gloaming presence of huge mature Ash trees and oaks and you are pretty much looking at travelling in darkness with the possibility of rocks falling on you.  But you don't go on an adventure if you are not adventurous, so in we chugged. 

Now, I am not going to try and create a false sense of suspense here; nothing remotely dramatic happened to us in Woodseaves Cutting.  But it was spooky.  And beautiful, too, the canal snaking out into the west behind us like a gold thread reflecting a sunset we could no longer see.  As we travelled further in, the sides of the cutting rose higher until our narrow 10 foot channel was framed by thirty feet rises on either side; huge trees holding onto the crumbly purple earth with all their might.  Sometimes, to our fascinated discomfort we would see a tree that had failed to hold on tightly enough to the yielding soil and had careened over, taking a myriad of smaller shrubs with it, its massive roots sticking incongruously up into the night air like a protest.  Huge birds whose silhouettes I could only just decipher flew out of this battlefield of trees across the water occasionally, heightening the illusion that we could be moving through a prehistoric landscape that was not the domain of humans, let alone their silly boats.  Occasionally we would meet a bridge, high and angular and purple-red like the earth they rose out of that stood out like a sign that humans had been here before, but otherwise Alan and I moved slowly and as quietly as our boat ever does through a strange,unpopulated and unstable bit of the canal where the trees and the earth and the birds are in charge.

* Far as I know it hasn't come yet.

Shroppie Fly

So there I was, in the pub toilets, trying to get a bit of peace and calm inside my brain. Could I remember the tune? The words? The noise in the bar area was making it very difficult; sea shanties, jigs and reels, a song about someone's daughter getting into a car with Jimi Hendrix accompanied by one bloke on a zither and another on the spoons. My mum was beside herself. We were all a bit chuffed, actually, about what a top night it was turning out to be. We, that is me, mum, Alan and Dawn had come out to this pub, the Shroppie Fly for their weekly folk session after a lovely day spent walking around the village of Audlem on the Shropshire/Cheshire border. The sun had come out and we and my mum and dad – down for a flying visit – had partaken of the local tea-shop, the local charity shop and the local damsons. Audlem has obviously been hit in the past by some sort of damson-based cluster bomb, there are so many of these bad boys in and around the village that I soon stopped feeling guilty about cramming my bags full of them in a fit of “forager's fever”. (You always get that when you are suddenly faced with a scrumptious great glut of something...there is an odd panic that sets in about getting enough of the wild comestible in question).

Something of the same fever had hit me earlier in the local charity shop. It was a tiny building, all higgledy-piggledy as though a giant baby had constructed it whilst playing stacking with crumbly white play-blocks. It was called “Audlem for Cancer Relief” I think. It was obviously independent but displayed in its window a giant cheque for £20,000; last year's contribution to Cancer Research by the people of this tiny village. This is an incredible sum considering not only the size of Audlem but also the fact that in this miniature Aladdin's cave of trinkets, jam kettles, crockery, clothes and kindly, wizened old ladies (the staff), the judicious punter could walk into the shop as I did, rummage around for a bit and walk out wearing a silk polka-dotted cravat and carrying a set of 6 solid silver soup spoons, a tin opener and a set of camping cutlery all for the princely sum of £1.70. My mum bought two lovely woolly cardigans and a giant suitcase and struggled to break the £3 barrier. One particular Yoda-like lady minding the shop (“Got a good few bits there, you have”) shuffled out from the shadows just as we were leaving and beamed “Come back tomorrow, we are having a sale!”. We did and they were, unbelievably. I couldn't find anything on sale that I needed as badly as a cravat and soup spoons though, but I did manage to walk off with two old mirrors and a 1970s pillar box red sun lounger for free when I passed by later after they were closed and saw them propped up by the bins. I really should go back and make a donation...

So back to the pub. I was a little oiled up on whiskey that night. I'd only had three but that's all it takes to make everything go pleasantly wonky (like the little charity shop!). The warm amber buzz in my veins was mingling nicely with the gentle joie de vivre that a day spent in the sun with loved ones in a small village whose buildings waddle their way round windy streets and damson trees to the water can bring. It was lovely. And then there was the music. Most of it was good, some brilliant. At the beginning of the evening there were five or six musicians sat around the central table playing, then gradually more and more players and singers drifted in with their instruments and their beers. Every song begun was joined by a dozen instruments as soon as the chords became clear and was lifted by a myriad voices at every chorus or refrain. It was wonderful. Not showy, not ponderous, just a lovely easy collaboration. The four of us would drift in and out of conversation as the music dictated; sometimes we'd be silent, lost in a mini-reverie. It was a fantastically relaxing evening. Imagine my irritation, then, when a renegade bit of my brain – a troublemaker from one of the less lazy, bumbly corners of my cranium pipes up and says:

“You going to sing, then?”.

I ignored it. Sometimes the best thing to do if you want a quiet life is ignore the annoying stuff and hope it goes away. It didn't.

“Come on, your mum'd love it. She said as much.”

“Shut up. I am listening to this man singing about his big sailing ship.”

“I know you want to”

“Nope”

“You do. You do, you do, you do,do,do.”

“I do not. Piss off.”

“Come on, you lazy tart, why don't you just do it? S'easy. Do Chastity Belt, they'd love a bit of it.”

“No, I am enjoying myself. I don't need to be involved to have a lovely time (this was true). I don't need the hassle.”

“You're scared, aren't you?”

“Nooooo, (this was untrue) I just don't want the hassle.”

“You should be bloody scared.” Chimed in another bit of my brain, this bit probably lives on its own under a dripping concrete bridge lit by a single street lamp somewhere, “These people are all a lot older than you, they probably know loads of stuff about folk, loads of songs, they'd probably sneer at you, listen to you for half a verse, then judge your voice, choice of song and general cheek to be beyond tolerance and go out and build a big Cheshire-style Wicker Man to burn you and your entire family in”.

“Ha! Ha!” put in the renegade “NOW you're scared!”.

“I am not bloody scared. Shut it both of you. I am going for a slash.”

“We're coming with you”.

That is how I ended up in the toilets of the Shroppie Fly trying to exercise a bit of mental control. By this time, several other bits of my brain had come to join in the debate – like a run on the soap box at Speaker's Corner. The annoying thing was: I knew I would do it. Even though the very thought of going in there, sitting back down at my drink, waiting for a lull between offered songs and then having to gather up all my anxieties, fear and self-consciousness into one bundle, shove it kicking and screaming under the bed in my head, take a deep breath and start singing in front of a room full of strangers, all locals, all of whom had been coming to this folk session for years and who might already have a Wicker Man handily stowed in the boot of the car made me feel sick. But this is the curse of the performer. 49% of your brain votes against doing stuff like this for all of the reasons above (and more). But they are narrowly outvoted by the 51% who love the challenge. Who will do anything for a dare. There is really only a tiny bit of egotism in there really if the truth be told. Most of it is being unable to walk away from the challenge once you've put it in front of yourself. Stage fright is basically the manic, outraged screaming of the 49% who are convinced it would be a Bad Idea. They will stop at nothing to get you not to do it; they will make you sick to your stomach, make you forget the words or the tune of what you were going to do in order to scare you into chickening out, they will convince you of 1001 things that will go wrong, not can, WILL.

But that just makes the 51% even more pig-headed and stubborn.

Defeated by the 51%, me and the 49% trudged back to my seat and took a big w=swig of my whiskey. Then, in the very next lull between tunes, before I had mentioned anything to my companions to warn them, and certainly before the 49% could do anything about it, the 51% opened my mouth and made a loud sound come out. The room turned to watch me in surprise – but it looked like pleased surprise. I found that I was singing a song called “My Grandma Lives on Winson Green”, a Brummie folk song about going out with boys in them days. When I got to the chorus, twenty or more voices joined in; it was like being thrown high in the air from a blanket held by twenty pairs of hands. I finished to loads of applause and cheering, the 51% beaming smugly at the 49% with an “I told you so”. I felt everso chuffed inside. I had another gulp of the amber stuff. It did nothing to calm the burning in my cheeks, ears and tummy even though I was, according to a group of boaters who stopped me outside the paper shop next day to talk to me about it, apparently very calm and professional-looking.

You see, I am no Great Singer. This much is true. But I love giving people a story – to a tune or not – and I am a stubborn cow.

Later that evening they asked for another song from me. I did Chastity Belt. They loved a bit of it.

Three Swims

Last week, moored in Llangollen, I managed to do a bit of wild swimming. I often do a bit of that – some would say ill advisedly – in the ponds on Hampstead Heath and it is the closest thing to having my crumpled brain ironed smooth that I can possibly get. Horseshoe falls in Llangollen is basically a massive weir formed of a great semi-circular pool some 100 meters long and 20 meters in width. It was built, fact fans, by Thomas Telford (the industrial revolution's version of Bob the Builder) in 18-oh-something to keep water from the river Dee flowing into the newly dug Llangollen Canal. We had stopped in a beautiful cutting, framed by rolling meadows with oaks and horse chestnut trees all overlooked by a huge brooding hill, its red stone showing like a fresh cut in its lush green skin. The wounds were in fact 100 years old, made by quarry men plundering this rise and countless others in the area for slate. Heather and gorse coloured the neighbouring hills purple and yellow and the sheep grazed in impossibly green meadows that fell right down to the canal edge. On this dank grey typical summer morning we cycled the two miles from this spot over arse-bruisingly bumpy towpath to the very source of this canal; the River Dee and Horseshoe Falls.

I had gone there intending to swim, but I was in no hurry about it. As Alan got out his book, I sat next to him on a rock as dog-walkers and joggers passed us, not really to take anything in or get a feel of the place – although it was dramatic and beautiful, a deep round valley edged by soft green hills and woodland, the water like a bowl of liquid silver under the grey sky – but because I had that morning noticed that all the Lycra in my costume was shot to buggery and it hung around my bottom like a turkey's neck. I did not particularly wish to share this with the people of North Wales. So I waited for a bit and once the coast was clear I slipped into the water off a huge flat slate rock, smoothed by the thousands of bums that had sat on it over the years.

The river water was cold but invigorating. Now, I know that “invigorating” is one of Those Adjectives. You know the ones, words like “Interesting” or “Informative” that people use instead of saying “more boring than John Major's pants-drawer” or “shite”. However, I must explain that to an outdoor swimmer “Freezing” is of course a given. “Freezing” is what water generally feels like when it has been carelessly left outside somewhere, anywhere, in Britain. But, much as the Eskimos have exactly 91 different words for snow, a wild swimmer (as I rather racily enjoy being called) has approximately 19 different words for freezing*. “Invigorating” is the kind of freezing that puts you on the delicious borderline between surprise and pain. It feels almost unbearably cold for approximately seven and a half seconds and then, just before you give up and get out, your body is flooded with pain killing endorphins in a scrumptious tingly wave that starts at the centre of your body and glows outwards like an explosion of hot chocolate. Most unfortunately, it never quite glows outwards far enough to reach your extremities, and that is why you eventually blunder out of the water, as I did. But not before I had spent 20 minutes or so sending giant bow waves sweeping out and away from my slow breast stroke. The water felt smooth and it lapped languidly against the shores either side of me as I swam. Halfway through the swim, wanting to feel the heady almost-warm sensation of skin that is so much colder than the air, I emerged from the water to explore other areas of entry to the falls. I toddled around bare footed and saggy swimsuited to three other little doorways to the water all beside alder trees, those great water lovers that, like me, see a bit of water and have to put their feet in and have a paddle. I felt like a six year old, inwardly giggling with delight as I managed to clamber down over the giant vein like roots of one alder, some 200 years older than me, into a sandy bottomed hollow filled with tiny fish. Once my hands were yellowed with numbness I climbed out, my whole body feeling like a giant menthol sweet - all tingly and numb - and cycled into Llangollen to reward and rewarm myself with a hot chocolate in the overpriced tea rooms.

The following morning brought summer along with it and my second swim was in the golden heat of the day. The sunlight showed the water to be clear and deep, the colour of black tea and full – so the local fishing-mad teens told me – of trout and chub. I went in by the 200 year old alder, wading first to enjoy the silky river sand between my toes and then, once I had done enough gasping and fannying about in the excitement and dread of the shoulders going in and being glooped over with icy water, I dived in. I swam across the weir this time to a little island in its cente and waded out onto it in the shade of a massive old oak. The land was planted with crops – brassicas I think, cabbagey anyway – and the summery sounds of distant voices and running water were punctuated at times by the hoot of the old steam engine taking people to and fro in the woodlands beyond the falls. The water looked too delicious on this hot day to stay out of it for long so I ran for it and whooshed and whooped my way back in. The sun exploded off the water in hundreds of tiny diamonds as I disturbed the surface and it moved beneath me, slowly but with considerable force towards the edge of the weir. It was like swimming in a brimming teacup. Since this tea was pretty damn far from piping hot however, I got out and had to have my useless hands warmed by Alan. It was 20 minutes before they got their colour back. I then put them to good use shoving cake and pork pie into my mouth as a reward for my hard-as-nails-ness.

The next day – our last in Llangollen – and I was in a stinking mood. The weather had gone totally shite again after getting us all excited the day before, and we had been in the valley long enough for the hills which once had rolled passed jollily to begin seriously now to loom. The sky was grey as week-old porridge and the wind was brutal. Alan got it into his head that what I really needed to cheer me up was to strip down to a wrinkly cossie in these Arctic conditions and go for a dip in cold water. Outside. Now of course I know this is exactly what I had done on the previous two days, and I have sat here describing it to you in all nice flowery language. And of course I knew that once I was in it would be more like a bracing experience than a deeply unpleasant one. So of course, I know – and knew at the time – that Alan was in fact right. But I had a cob on, so was buggered if I was going to admit it. So I moaned and moped about until eventually he did something which I suspect he began immediately to regret. He said “I'll come in with you”.

Off we cycled, then. On the bank as we gingerly peeled back layers of protective woolly clothing (August – I mean, really!) and squinted against the wind, I had a sudden image of the sign pinned to the noticeboard at Hampstead Ladies' Pond; a sign that you read diligently the first time you go and then nonchalantly ignore completely on subsequent visits. The sign says “Warning! Cold water immersion shock can KILL!!!!” The exclamation marks and capitals are probably mine, but that is basically what the sign says. It goes on to explain that if you have not done a bit of gradual acclimatisation, the shock of really cold water can send you into spontaneous cardiac arrest. As Alan got down to his trunks it struck me that although he is a strong man and no way weedy, I have in fact seen more fat on a chip. There would be no subcutaneous blanket-layer protecting him from the ill effects of the “invigorating” water. He had done no acclimatisation as I had in my two previous swims at the Falls and plenty of others this year in ponds and on beaches in all weathers. Jesus Christ, he was shivering in the wind already and he was bone dry. I suddenly began to get the fear that he would be “invigorated” to death. Valiantly he pinned his long dark hair up into a top knot that made him look like a samurai warrior in Bermuda trunks and grinned not all convincingly. I couldn't watch. I went in off the slate rock and made encouraging noises as he began to stride into the cold black iced-tea doing a passable impression of a rabbit staring confidently into a set of headlights. The fact that he, in his words “allowed myself to fall in” probably saved him a great deal of prolonged discomfort in the long run and he instead went straight into the watery world of pain that accompanies an incredibly, unbearably cold swim. Gamely he swam out from the bank, but his lips had turned blue by about two minutes in. We swam to the island of cabbages and squatted in the silty mud, still in the water, while Alan's conscious mind caught lazily up with his outraged body across the water. “You alright?” I asked, pointlessly. “Yeah” came the vague reply. This was total bollocks. The man was in pain, clearly. But was he in “Cold water immersion shock can KILL!!!!” pain? He had certainly gone white. And his breath was laboured after a bit of exertion that would not usually tax him, he is pretty fit. I decided I might have had a hand in killing my boyfriend just because I had woken up with a it of a mardy arse that morning. “Think I'm gonna swim back and get out” he said, although from his cold-benumbed lips it came out more like “Finb iyb unna swimmack an geddowd”. OK matey, I thought, I am not going to leave your side just in case you spontaneously carp it. I had done my Lifesaver badge at Guides, so I was pretty sure I could make an attempt at pulling him out with only a moderate risk of drowning us both. Alan climbed out of the water and stayed motionless, wrapped in a towel for some time; a postiton he would mimic throughout the rest of the day wrapped in various thick garments as his body warmed and is brain very slowly thawed. I stayed in for a bit, at eye level with the ducks and damselflies, marvelling with them at what a difference a little cold water acclimatisation and a subcutaneous layer of pork pies can make to a wild swim.

*Actually, there are 20 Wild Swimmer terms for “Freezing” . Here they are:

Invigorating

Bracing

Tingly

Brisk

Luke-cold

Warm (i.e. only cold-ish)

Icy

Cold as the bloody tomb

Arse-burningly cold

Numb-lestiltskin

Frigging Arctic

Spiny

Spirit crushingly cold

Hypothermic

Suicidally cold

Nippy (what a swimmer will say about “Suicidally cold” water to someone watching from land)

Scrotum-tightening (ladies are also permitted to use this term)

Eyeball shattering

Not too bad ('aaargh, this hurts so much!')

Ooh! (actually almost warm)