The following is an excerpt taken with exclusive permission from Jack’s new book: Cold Water. This exciting new family adventure takes the reader from London’s lidos to Iceland’s Atlantic bays. It is part exploration of why people love to swim in the cold, part memoir of four years' worth of Jack’s own winter swims with his family.

This is an excerpt from an early chapter in the book recollecting the first lockdown.

‘Cold Water’ is currently available for pledges on copies and other exclusive rewards, funding via the award-winning Unbound platform.

Escape From Lockdown One

Suddenly the entire world had changed. Our entire species ushered indoors. Think your weekly podcast had something new to discuss? Guess again, all anyone could talk about was the virus. Plans were grounded. Families were left isolated. Politicians went into a slogan frenzy. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger sent out viral goodwill, chewing a cigar in his mansion hot tub and telling us to hang tough. 

Streets cleared. Skies emptied. Ghost trains snaked through London with no passengers. We were living in this world torn from a page of George Monbiot’s: Feral. Wallabies hopped down deserted roads in Adelaide. Elephants took up jaywalking in Thailand. Shoals of fish spilled back into the Venetian canals. The buzz of human traffic. The screech of juddering trains. All of it was gone – it seemed our only course of action was to wait out the disease… 

Life was quiet in the months thereafter. Often you needed to take a breath. Get out. Find space. An everyday tightness is expected in the city. All those sweaty clinches were common – the ones when you’re straitjacketed on a held-up tube, staring off into a grimy corner, or a stranger’s armpit. The nine-to-five suck. At least that was gone. Most commutes switched from an hour in traffic to a semi-dressed amble from a bed to a desk in the same building. Other times, the walls closed in. Rows of tall tenements huddled together, peering into each other’s gardens. Your outdoor allowance grew more precious each day. Soon a walk in the park felt like that scene in Shawshank, when Andy Dufresne crawls through pipes of shit to finally be spat out into the rain and washed clean. You could find room under the sky. The local green lungs sucked in first-time joggers and yoga newbies. There were still places to breathe and lose time. Even if your only sense of wildlife were howling foxes locked in nightly orgies/battles (it was impossible to tell which), turtles and squirrels in Brockwell Park, moor hens and the muscled Geese Mafia at Serpentine Lake, or the famous parakeets and deer of Richmond. 

After Lockdown One, this tightness mutated from months on the inside. Our ‘time in the yard’ extended. We were able to break out for a few extra hours and by then there was only one thing on our mind. On May 28th, Anna and I cycled to the woods of Hackney Marshes and found a shallow strip of river to submerge ourselves in. We drank cans of beer and dipped in sun-dappled water. Tree boughs snaked overhead and the canopy enclosed our newfound swim spot. A short way upriver there was a rope swing and a few walkers arrived with dogs at midday. We watched as one dog sprinted into the river and chased a stick and gnashed the water. It displayed a natural abandon that put us all to shame. 

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