Too much to see
Honestly, I need a lobotomy.
I envy heads-up breastrokers: their unwetted hair, their sunglasses, their ignorance-is-bliss, their world where everything is as it seems. No wonder they glide along happily chatting and marvelling at the normal world. They are oblivious to what is below.
For me with my head down, wide-eyed-scanning the terrifying world beneath me — my heart beats alarmingly fast.
Canary Wharf. Middle Dock. Saturday. The water is terrifyingly clear.
Here is a graveyard of chairs: I count eight or ten. Some skeletons have all their limbs intact, unnaturally landed upside down, belly-up. Some smashed into pieces, legs scattered like bones. I swim past the waterside bar alongside, imagining obnoxious city boys, too loud, too eager to impress, too many bottles of expensive wine into the night, picking up the furniture and hurling it, laughing uproariously, to its watery final resting place. I shudder.
A hundred metres later on I startle myself with an unexpected underwater ledge of concrete rubble, as though someone has tipped in liquid concrete and it has bubbled and set and come to rest here: ugly and rough; gnarly and pockmarked. Not smooth and contained and well-ordered like the sides of the buildings around. I swim on hurriedly.
Then the worst part. A section of a scaffolding tower lies slumped on the basin floor, lying in a shambles on its side, big enough that it looms closer to the surface than I’d like. I swim over the top of it. Metres long, perfectly intact, gradually being covered by green sludge and algae. Why is it here? How long has it been lying quietly below the surface, unseen? I feel a sense of dread each time I swim over, imagining its life, and death. Once upon a time I imagine it strong and reliable, sturdy and proud, part of a team of scaffolding units that stood erect and built this docklands, with its mad metal and glass edifices. It had capability and strength and purpose. Now it lies here, forgotten and unloved, decaying and useless. Each circuit I do I give it a wider and wider berth. It terrifies me, a reminder of the way of all things.
I wish the water were murkier, or I could do head-up breaststroke.
There is too much to see here.
