Monthly Archives: August 2018

There are doors, and there are doors.

One of the great doors of the world is the unassuming entrance to the South End Rowing Club, standing in the middle of Fisherman’s Wharf and North Beach overtourism. Hundreds and possibly thousands pass the door of this and neighbouring Dolphin Club each day without stopping to read the sign that proclaims it is open to non-members, with the implication being that all you have to do is work out how to pass through the portal to the other side.

I’ve done so twice now, and both times it was a similar experience. Like the first time, I stood at the door for a moment, which rattled when pushed but did not open, then rang the bell and waited. And waited. And wondered if I should give up and/or run for the hills. San Francisco has lots of hills. Eventually someone let me in, I introduced myself and declared I was hoping for a swim. I was beckoned inside. Sign up, pay your $10 and you’re in. And as soon as I was it became clear that I had passed into an extraordinary place. A clubbified Men’s Pond for all genders, its bottom floor is a boathouse, home to a collection of beautiful rowing boats that give the club its name.

Upstairs, as shown by the chap who opened the door and who had immediately taken on the role of host and guide, a rag-tag changing room with space for hundreds to change. I made my excuses when he offered for me to join a collection of very laid-back swimmers lounging on big chairs who, I suspected, would swim for miles once in the water, and headed off by myself.

South End has its own access to a small beach, quiet and calm where a few yards away is crowds and chaos from the late-summer visitors to the city. I was still slightly (very) jetlagged, and had had a pretty stressful day, and after pausing to speak to a lady warming up for her own swim walked straight into the cold water. It took a while to get the measure of the water, pulling me this way and that, and to take in the mighty ships moored to my right and the long line of buoys running parallel to Aquatic Bay. The idea is you swim all the way along, then back, or around the Bay, or out to the mouth and back, or whatever. I aim for ten minutes, which is quite enough for me in my state. It is a marvellously solitary experience. The bay is home to old ships, a beach and distant view of the Golden Gate Bridge, with the fog rolling onto and over its northern end and across the high points of Marin County. What a lovely place for a swim.

The shower afterwards induces shivers, but as much as anything I rejoice in the sense of quiet privacy of being left alone in the club. Though I’m tempted to go back to the guys in their armchairs I don’t linger but head off straight uphill, which in this city means great stupidly steep gradients, and continue on another San Francisco institution, the seemingly unnecessarily yet also inevitable long and hilly walk back to my own neighbourhood.

In the still green silence of Northumberland, England’s biggest sky, we find fragments of the past at every turn.

A tiny road heads dead straight, almost due north, from somewhere small and not known to an equal point. The road is pitted and bumpy. It ends at a t-junction that is, in fact, a crossroads, for the road continues ahead. The Devil’s Causeway is still here. It’s not hidden, it runs for 50 miles or more, and is marked on maps. Here it runs through a grassy field. I put my hand into the grass – clumps of stone, roughly shaped. A Roman Road, but north of Hadrian’s Wall. Perhaps someone can explain to me how that worked.

Later it becomes clear the village we turned right at existed as a crossroad between the roman road and the path that monks travelled between Holy Island and Durham. And Iona too? A junction of obscurity. Were they the only traffic? Was it a highway of celebrity monks, Aidan, Cuthbert and their like? Just up the road is Ancroft, with a sign pointing to an 11th century church. Remarking that we’ve never stopped there despite driving past 20 times we do, and discover something. Squat and ageless, it predates Eleanor of Aquitaine, the Crusades, and is barely younger than England itself. Ancroft. Aidan’s Croft. The strange monkish atmosphere. It may account for all the silence.

On another day we go looking for the road again, further south, near Chillingham’s haunted castle. We find a ford, crossed also by a wonderful wooden bridge, and a standing stone, marked out presumably to stop a farmer ploughing into it. Winnie tells us here that ‘the Romans used wee to wash their hair’. After a mile or more the countryside drops away towards the Cheviot Hills, and a dramatic bridge carries the causeway away again.

It is hot and it is a strange sensation to be seeking ways to cool down in a place where you can look south to Scotland. We are wedged up against the border but free to wander over, usually via the Union Bridge. Once across there is the lovely River Tweed, and the chance to swim. The water is perfect and the river is broad. The kids splash in the shallows while Imogen and I take turns to swim part-way across, never quite brave enough to complete the international swim, but enough into disputed waters to be able to say we’ve done it.

A friend puts in our heads seeking out Twizell Bridge, a mighty medieval span which carried English and Scottish soldiers across the Till. Just down the road, Wark Castle guarded a section of the Tweed. Today it’s a pile of rubble that appears to sit in a few people’s back gardens who aren’t that happy to see us drive into their bit of town. It may be the place where Edward III first got the idea of the order of the garter, greeting hooting partygoers who mocked a lady who’d removed hers by putting it on and saying ‘honi soit qui mal y pense’ (‘evil be to him that evil thinks’. This phrase is so famous now it appears on the Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom. And here’s Wark Castle, a forgotten pile of old stones. Perhaps it wasn’t here. No-one knows to say it wasn’t. We all make remains and words and gestures live on.

On our last night thunder and lightning cracks the weather open, as if we’ve started something with what we’ve turned up.