At-swim-one-book
Posted on July 2, 2006
Filed Under Cornwall, Sport, books, health, holiday, nature, review, society, work | Leave a Comment
I’m an early riser, so before I went for a swim this morning, I finished reading in praise of slow by Carl Honore. Ironically, it’s a book that can be read very quickly. I started reading it last evening with my takeout pizza and I did feel a little guilty by the time I’d finished eating it. It’s a charming book and certainly makes one wonder about how to manage the work-life balance in our daily lives.
Honore starts the book with a good exposition on how time is central to our lives, how our relationship with it has been subtly influenced and made wide-ranging changes on our lives. Early man used the seasons to know when to plant crops and so on. As the centuries progressed, time got broken down into smaller and smaller chunks of time. By the time, the industrial revolution happened, time could be measured in minutes and seconds. Workers clocked in and out. They were paid for how long they worked rather than how much they produced.
Each chapter deals with a different topic (cities, food, sex, work, medicine etc) and he explores what is being done by ‘slow’ advocates around the world. He uses a nice mix of personal and international anecdotes, coupled with not-to-heavy academic research to push his agenda. Agenda may be the wrong word: he is pushing a message but his is more a plea to the reader to, well, slow down. It’s a message that resonates with me considering I’ve just returned from a week’s annual leave.
Sometimes he relies to much on American experiences and this lessens the overall impact. America is such a large country full of (ahem) individuals that you could find one of everything there. Need a grown man who wears nappies all day and believes in UFO’s – go to America.
His website (and blog) is inpraiseofslow.
As I mentioned already, I went for a swim in my local gym this morning. It was the first time I’d been swimming in a pool since I came back from Cornwall. It just reminded me how powerful and relentless the sea is. I used to be a competitive swimmer and I’d spend up to 3 hours a day, every day, training in a pool. You would just swim up and down, up and down. My speciality was backstroke so I knew how many strokes I would take before I’ve had to turn at the wall. I could almost swim my races blindfolded!
It’s an entirely different proposition in the sea and I’ve nearly really been comfortable swimming in the sea. For someone whose second home was the pool (after my swimming career, I played water polo and life-guarded), it’s an bit scary to tread water in the sea yet the sea still pushes you one way or the other.
It’s not too bad when you’re surfing or water-sking because at least you’re out of the water (most of the time!). If you get cramp or whatever, you can hold on to the board or, in the case of watersking, you’ll have a lifejacket. But swimming, it’s just you in a million acres of water. The guy in the picture has a lot of guts.
I’m in awe of those people who swim the English Channel and other mad swims. One time, I read an interview with one of them and part of his training involved swimming through jellyfish swarms to get used to the stings.
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