Going under

As someone slightly older than Al Alvarez, and also a regular swimmer — although not in the ice-edged Hampstead Heath pools into which he dived for over 60 years — I was initially disappointed by this book. For the first half it repeats too often the pleasures of extremity-numbing, cold, outdoor swimming when one is old. Alvarez’s outer and inner selves, in the first five or six years of this ten-year journal, rejoice with the ecstasy of swimming almost daily in water preferably just a few degrees above freezing, feeling the zing when he climbs out pink as a lobster and banters with the lifeguards.

But then, slowly and horrifyingly, he charts the not-so-gradual collapse of his once super-fit body. ‘What began as a swimming diary is turning into a chronicle of ageing.’ Although he still swims, ‘it seems to take longer to get my body working, my balance isn’t quite right… it’s a steady reminder of the sorry state I’m in and when I stagger in public… I feel like a sad old fool.’