Like many who saw it, I was saddened and shocked at the disregard for animals: people were clambering over nests, and trying to reach an island specially safeguarded for birds. Yet I also wondered what a polarised, emotive debate is going to achieve when, lurking behind the justified anger, is another question about our access to water.
Eh?
“It’s like nothing is free any more and that’s not fair for us as well. We don’t want to pay for … natural water” – this comment, given anonymously by one of the swimmers to the Times, was telling. There’s a feeling, I think, nationally, that our water no longer belongs to us. It is being cynically polluted, fenced off, or monetised.
Well, too bad, you have to pay for everything worth having in this life!
It’s great that we are seeing new designated swimming spaces, but demand is only going to increase as the climate continues to heat up.
Maybe, or maybe we'll switch to demanding aircon on the taxpayer's dime?
The well-known bathing ponds on either side of the wildlife pond on Hampstead Heath used to operate on an honesty system. Now you have to pay, and in hot weather the queues are long. At the same time, temperatures are getting hotter and hotter, and city life is becoming less bearable. There are not enough accessible places to swim.
Well, gosh, its almost as if honesty systems don't work anymore when you transition from a high trust society to a multicultural one!
On the one hand, wild swimming has become totally fetishised, tweely marketed as a middle-class lifestyle choice and a cure-all, and spots where you can swim are more and more swamped. On the other, you have “no swimming” signs but very little clarity about why they are there (at the wildlife pond in Hampstead Heath it’s not made clear why that one, of the three, is off limits, and there was scant information about the birds and their habitat), let alone a proper national conversation about what our rivers, seas, lakes and ponds are for.
As if anyone from the most selfish generation would read it, or care if they did!
The many campaigns against the pollution of our rivers and seas have been excellent, but as well as those, and teaching children to swim, we should be discussing how we navigate risk and educate people about the potential impact of open water swimming both on human and animal lives. By all means issue more fines – but also put up boards explaining why people shouldn’t swim, just as “no swimming” signs in danger spots should explain the actual risks.
If organisations were to put up signs warning of the danger of drowning, they would get complaints about them being that most overused modern word, ‘triggering’ and if they were to put up signs noting the prevalence of drowning deaths amongst ethnic minorities , that too would attract campaigners whining that water is racist!
They can’t win, so the only sensible move is not to play the game!
In some ways, the Hampstead Heath saga reminds me of the visceral response to the felling of the sycamore gap tree: valid anger about the environment or animal welfare escalating to an irrational point, with outraged comments online wishing diarrhoea and vomiting on the swimmers.
As an island nation, swimming is encoded in many of us from a very young age. As people continue to lose their lives, education and investment are more urgent than ever.
Only if the people we were losing were worth saving, Rhiannan....
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