The last time I put to sea was with an injured soldier. Phil and I rowed together from England to France. Written on the boat were the words “Dedication is What You Do When Nobody is Watching”. It’s a saying that will serve me well crossing the Atlantic.

There will be four of us out there, thousands of miles from land in a little pea green boat. Two hours of rowing, two hours break, two hours rowing. Repeat for as long as it takes to strike land on the far side. We anticipate that will be somewhere between 45 and 60 days.

If you are rowing solo the equations are very simple: row harder = go faster. Rest and relax = stay still. The choice is yours. You will only reach the end when you have earned the end. In a team of four it is different. There is scope to not pull with all your might. You can not bother to repair something because someone else will do it eventually. You can give less than your all and still reach the finish line.

I know that at times I will be tired or demoralised. My arse will hurt (indeed I am still in a lot of pain from this) and the end will seem far off. I will be at sea with three virtual strangers. I know that our bond will grow into a strong team willing to help each other and work hard for each other. But before we arrive at that stage my motivation must really just be for myself. To do the job properly, to arrive on the far side satisfied that I gave my all and not to have any lingering feelings that I took the easy route at any time.

The video below is an excellent demonstration of this idea. Put your heart and soul into what you do, at all times, everywhere. Dance like nobody’s watching.

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“I shall be very much astonished if in the long run some people do not change their minds as to my doing…” - Vincent Van Gogh

Once upon a time there was a painter called Van Gogh. He was a bit of a loser.
He was destitute, unheralded and sold his paintings for a pittance to pay for food and paint.
People probably raised their eyebrows and asked gently, but pointedly, whether it wasn’t about time he got a “proper job”. He was not the sort of person respectable folk would want their daughters to marry…
Even he went so far as to write, “What am I in the eyes of most people?  A good-for-nothing, an eccentric and disagreeable man, somebody who has no position in society and never will have.”

So if this is you too, do not despair. If you’re battering away trying to make your way at something you love, if you’re frustrated about how hard it is, how lucky everyone else seems to be, how little time you have to work on your ideas, read on. For although Van Gogh was depressed and snubbed, he would not give in.
He continues,“Very well, even if that were true, I want to show by my work what there is in the heart of such an eccentric man, of such a nobody.
I believe more and more that to work for the sake of the work is the principle of all great artists: not to be discouraged even though almost starving, and though one feels one has to say farewell to all material comfort.”

Keep at it. Keep daubing your dabs of paint, your starry nights, your jars of sunflowers. Don’t give up, even if you won’t make your millions for another century. Do what you love, and do it well. Do it because you love it, because you care about it, and because you feel it is important. Don’t be swayed by ‘respectable folk’ and their bloody raised eyebrows.

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Look at the normal with fresh eyes. Seek the extra-ordinary in the ordinary. Step away from the pleasant, unsurprising riverside picnic. Step away and slide down into the water. See the world from a different perspective. Be surprised. Swim a river.
“In wild water you are on equal terms with the animal world around you; in every sense, on the same level” wrote Roger Deakin, the patron saint of wild swimmers. He is right. Swimming down a river for a couple of days has been the most surprising experience of this year of microadventures. Once I had slipped past the green picnic meadow, past the surprised grins and sun/booze-flushed faces of the riverside pub garden I was into the wild. Wiltshire, yes, but wild. My eyes were but an inch or two above the water’s surface so the banks of reeds, bushes and sweet-smelling pink willowherb towered high above me. I could see very little beyond the watery channel that was sweeping me gently on my first river journey. The sun sweeping to and fro across the sky told me that my river was meandering through all points of the compass. It was disorientating and I found it impossible to gauge how fast I was travelling. But it didn’t matter one jot for I was here to explore this river so whichever way the river went was the right way.

I swam through reeds beside the bank, startling moorhens and reed warblers. I imagined giant pike lurking in the murky water waiting to nibble my toes. I kicked a little faster.
Later I swam through lily pads, sweeping them aside with my hands as I glided by. I swam breaststroke, what Roger Deakin called “the naturalist’s stroke” as it is the best way to take in all the sights and sensations. Besides, recent rains meant that the warm water was thick with silt so there was nothing to see below the surface. This was a pity as I had looked forward to exploring the totally alien world beneath the surface. My strongest (and most annoying) demonstration that to swim a river is to dangle between two separate worlds was when I let go, for a fraction of a second, my expensive waterproof camera (a GoPro). And it was gone. Gone. Gone forever into the opaque underwater world below.

Warm water. Blue sky. Fluffy clouds. I lay on my back and kicked my legs for a few minutes, my waterproof red bag towing along gently behind me. I could not believe that I had never taken a journey (even a tiny one like this) down a river before. It was an experience quite unlike running or cycling or even canoeing. It felt wild, really wild. Feral and primitive. Not feral and primitive like the rioters who were -completely unbeknownst to me- smashing up London a few miles down my river. But feral because this most mundane and domesticated corner of southern England suddenly felt wild again.

I lay in a wood on the riverbank in my sleeping bag listening to the noises of a wild night. I couldn’t see lights or hear roads. I saw stars instead. I heard a long chorus of rooks. And throughout the night my wood was alive with crashing beasts – deer, rabbits, foxes – and occasional fat fish leaped and splashed in the black river by my feet.

Dawn. Coffee. My hair reeked of wood smoke. The silent river slid by. A silver mirror. Or a natural, beautiful, uplifting, thrilling version of those flat escalators that fat and mind-numbed people stand on to be moved around airports. This microadventure was so far from that sanitised, dreary world. But that is the world I am desperate to connect with through my microadventures: with people who’ve never camped, never cooked on a fire, never stared at stars, never swum in a river. A poor life this if, full of care, we have no time to swim and stare and be surprised.
I eased myself down into the water and began another day of swimming, wishing that I could carry on this journey all the way down to the sea and the proper end. It has been a revelation. I suspect that this river swim is going to be my favourite of this year’s microadventures.

I made a short video about this trip which I’ll post here soon…

If you are interested in outdoor swimming then I really recommend these three links:
- Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey – by Roger Deakin.
- The Outdoor Swimming Society.
- Join in and swim the Thames with Tim Moss.

Thank you to Jim Shannon for lending me a waterproof camera housing.

Related posts:

1. Microadventure #8: Wild Swim Video
2. Microadventure Reading List
3. Microadventure 7: River – Source to Sea

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Heavy Metal’s not for me. I don’t get it.
But a movie about a failed Heavy Metal band is one of the best things I’ve watched all year. I’ll add it to my list of inspiring films.

At 14, Toronto school friends Steve “Lips” Kudlow and Robb Reiner made a pact to rock together forever. Their band, Anvil, went on to become the “demigods of Canadian metal,” releasing one of the heaviest albums in metal history, 1982′s Metal on Metal. The album influenced a musical generation that went on to sell millions of records. But Anvil’s career took a different path – straight to obscurity…

Picking up on their story 26 years later, the film covers Anvil’s last-ditch quest for elusive fame and fortune. ‘Lips’, the leader of the band works in a factory processing kids’ school meals. Yet he still has not given up on his dream to be a rock star. It’s painful to watch them work so hard for so little.

At its core, Anvil! The True Story of Anvil is a timeless tale of survival and the unadulterated passion it takes to follow your dream, year after year. Anvil rocks – it has no other choice.

The film is charming, funny, fascinating and all good things like that.
But the reason I am writing about it here is that I also found it raised important questions for me about my own direction as we come to terms with yet another year passing without getting the South Pole expedition sponsorship we need. These questions include:

• Is it laudable to relentlessly pursue your dreams even when you are too old and balding to be a Heavy Metal star and it imposes frustration, sadness and financial struggle on your family?
• Is it laudable instead to concede that you have failed in your life’s dream and focus instead on making an alternate, happier future? Know when to walk away, know when to run…
• Lips believes that so long as he has written a great album the success is the same whether 10 people or 10 million people hear it. Is he right?
• If you’re not famous are you a failure?
• If you’re famous are you a success?
• Would I rather be famous (or, the way that applies to my life, would I rather be earning money more easily) or would I rather be doing stuff I’m proud of? I blogged about this question here.

I admire Lips’ dedication, his persistence, his optimism (“Everything on the tour went drastically wrong. But at least there was a tour for it to go wrong on“). And if I thought I would even listen to it just one single time I would buy an Anvil album as these guys deserve to succeed. I think. And what is ‘success’ anyway?

Anyway, I’m really pleased to discover that since the movie came out Anvil have headlined at some big events. Which, I guess, shows that persistence pays. As that heavy metal afficionado General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmany Melchett once said, “If all else fails, a pig-headed refusal to look facts in the face will see us through…”

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