The wild side
A subject described by a colleague of mine, as I ranted, as ‘sooooooo Sunday supplement’. But I’ll post it on a Friday anyway.
Putting ‘wild’ in front of something does not automatically raise it into the realms of peril and adventure. This is particularly true of swimming and camping.
Swimming is great, but can be somewhat hectic at half-term, where lots of excited children in the water basically results in you swimming in child soup. As alternative to breaststroking through a cocktail of chlorine and pee, how about using a natural pool? Possibly a limpid one in a glade. That, or the river or a lake or the sea.
When did swimming out doors, which er, most people do when on holiday, become ‘wild swimming’? Surely ‘wild swimming’ is when one pitches over the side of the boat into the rapids or when somebody on the beach screams for your attention and utters the sentence no bather ever wants to hear ‘don’t look behind you…just swim!’
It’s like ‘wild camping’ – it’s a tent, in a field – it’s not wild camping…it’s camping! Just camping and only camping. What the hell do you expect camping to entail…pitching a tent indoors? That’s not a camping site, it’s the shop floor at Millets!
Wild camping should include at least the following elements: an extinction level weather event, an animal attack repelled with a shovel, scenery containing at least one precipice and last but not least, a sing-song.
Putting ‘wild’ in front of something does not automatically raise it into the realms of peril and adventure. This is particularly true of swimming and camping.
Swimming is great, but can be somewhat hectic at half-term, where lots of excited children in the water basically results in you swimming in child soup. As alternative to breaststroking through a cocktail of chlorine and pee, how about using a natural pool? Possibly a limpid one in a glade. That, or the river or a lake or the sea.
When did swimming out doors, which er, most people do when on holiday, become ‘wild swimming’? Surely ‘wild swimming’ is when one pitches over the side of the boat into the rapids or when somebody on the beach screams for your attention and utters the sentence no bather ever wants to hear ‘don’t look behind you…just swim!’
It’s like ‘wild camping’ – it’s a tent, in a field – it’s not wild camping…it’s camping! Just camping and only camping. What the hell do you expect camping to entail…pitching a tent indoors? That’s not a camping site, it’s the shop floor at Millets!
Wild camping should include at least the following elements: an extinction level weather event, an animal attack repelled with a shovel, scenery containing at least one precipice and last but not least, a sing-song.
1 Comments:
Is that what people are calling it these days? I guess us rednecks down here in the South USofA still think of it as normal. Swimming in lakes and ponds and rivers, that is...We may have to start calling it Hazard Swimming due to the levels of oil in the Gulf, but not so much "wild".
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