RedSzéll.com

Though The DDR officially ceased to exist in 1990 The East German flag is still proudly on display in and around Highgate Men’s Pond. Warum?

It’s a symbol of resurrection, of a return from the dead.

On 18^th December 2009 Hampstead resident Tom Kearney was standing on the pavement at the edge of a pedestrian crossing on Oxford Street when he was hit by a Bendy Bus. The impact cracked his skull, burst both his lungs and threw him 20 feet down Europe’s busiest shopping street. When paramedics arrived, they could find no pulse.

Doctors at the Royal London Hospital fought to save Tom’s life; prevented his lungs from dying and drilled a hole in his skull to stop his brain from exploding under the pressure of bleeding. But that was only half the battle. When Tom woke from a coma in mid-January 2010 he had to re-learn how to speak, walk, eat and drink again. He remained in hospital for months.

Then, while slowly recovering at his home in Hampstead, his neighbor, writer Al Alvarez, gave him a piece of life-changing advice.

A lifelong Hampstonian, Alvarez has been swimming in the Heath Ponds daily since he was a teenager before The War. He told Tom to

“Get in the Ponds.  If a Bendy Bus can’t kill you, the Ponds certainly won’t.  Besides, I think It will make you better.”

Taking Al’s advice, Tom began swimming regularly at Highgate Men’s Pond in September 2011.  Al was right, the cool fresh water aided his recovery. Tom’s enthusiasm meant that soon friends, acquaintances, and friends-of-friends started joining his weekend swims, the number rising week-by-week even as the water temperature dropped.

And so the East German Ladies Swimming Team was born: a bunch of middle-aged dads for the most part, who brave the ponds in whatever the weather, the colder the better.

Why the name? An early photograph of the group received a scathing response from a spouse.  Instead of praising the fortitude of her man and his friends, she compared them to the 1976 East German Ladies Swimming Team, large in physique, full of testosterone and the vanquisher of all opponents at the Montreal Olympics

Now numbering some 40 members, EGLST meet every Saturday and Sunday (and when possible during the week) at the top of Parliament Hill, before a short run (or stroll) round The Heath, finishing at the Highgate Men’s Pond for a swim – rain or shine, ice or snow.

To swim in the ponds is to immerse yourself in London’s social and cultural fabric. The Highgate Ponds were dug in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. The clay taken from them was used in the bricks of houses for miles around. Thereafter the quarries were flooded to become reservoirs for the area’s growing population. Now of course they are a construction site again – though hopefully this is only a temporary state of affairs…

They have been immortalized in paintings by Constable and a poem by William Blake. The Men’s Pond is on a spot where the poet John Keats is supposed to have listened to nightingales and chatted to Samuel Coleridge. It opened in 1893, and remains a place where it doesn’t matter what your job, your title or your religion, as long as you share the love of an open-water swim.

The EGLST includes young and old from all walks of life. Though we all live in the area, members hail from five different continents. But we are united under one flag we wear with pride on our own-branded swimming caps, trunks and beanies.

So if you are passing by The Men’s Pond and happen to see a flotilla of white-capped heads emblazoned with the East German flag (and the motto ‘moob rule since 2011) remember, it’s not some kind a political statement, a yearning for the bad old days of Erich Honecker and the Berlin Wall. No, it’s worn with a big ironic grin in full acknowledgement that it took Tom being hit by a bus and returning from the dead for him and all of us to discover this way of feeling fully alive.   Nobody leaves the pond in the same mood they entered it – everyone emerges revivified and smiling.

That’s why each year on December 18^th we celebrate ‘Bus Day’ and toast another year lived to the full thanks to the Ponds, and Al Alvarez.

Al Alvarez’s excellent book Pondlife – A Swimmer’s Journalis available at Daunt Books, Waterstones and any other bookshop worth it’s salt and not just selling pulp-porn masquerading as something worth reading.

Tom Kearney has campaigned tirelessly since 2012 for TfL to improve its Bus Safety Reporting and Monitoring and for Oxford Street to be pedestrianized.

As a result of his work, TfL has, since 2014, published statistics of casualties involving TfL buses (29 pedestrians a month were hit by by buses in 2015).

Earlier this year TfL launched ‘a world-leading bus safety programme’ based on many of Tom’s recommendations. All of the major candidates for Mayor of London have pledged to pedestrianize Oxford Street.

I don’t like dogs, never have done, at least not since next door’s Alsatian jumped up and bit me on the face when I was three years old.

They smell, foul the pavement, cruise the park looking for things (and people) to chase; and the little mutt over the road yaps incessantly.

No, I really don’t like dogs.  So why am I thinking of getting one?

Well, in the past year my vision has gone from bad but enough to get around with a white stick and only the odd accident, to agoraphobic – not wanting to leave the house alone for fear of getting lost or damaged.

Two incidents in particular brought this home to me; first, getting lost in my local park and ending up in the lake; then, just a week later, being saved as I was about to wander off the platform edge into the path of an oncoming Tube train.

Going blind is a hazardous business and minding the increasingly large gaps it leaves is hard work.  No matter how good the tactile paving or the smartphone app sometimes I just zone out for a moment – and that’s when accidents happen.

But the more my sight deteriorates the more I need to leave the house.  I want to swim and go climbing and visit friends and not feel intimidated.

I used to say that the worst part of losing my sight was losing the ability to read.  Talking Books have gone a long way to filling that void.  It’s not the same totally immersive experience but I get through many more books because it’s hands-free and makes doing the cooking and ironing more fun.

But I came late to Talking Books.  I let my unwillingness to accept any loss of independence trump my need for an alternative.

So what do I like less, dogs or agoraphobia?

Fortunately guide dogs are not ‘click and collect’ items.  Having contacted the association in January, it was reassuring to find myself at the start of a process that will take at least a year and that I can opt out at any time.  I’m also happy to report that not being a dog-lover did not count against me.  A guide dog, I was told, is a working dog, not a pet.

My climbing partner Matthew, (who promises not to delegate the job of leading me up rock faces to a hound in harness) assures me that being a dog-owner is great; not least because it means a member of the household regards you as god!  I doubt my cat will see it that way.

It was my daughter who pointed it out.

“Dad, all these cars on Fitzjohn’s. All these people marching along in uniform, hundreds of them – it’s creepy.”

We were on our way to school, they were all on their way to school.  And it’s not just Fitzjohn’s Avenue.  It’s Willow Road, New End, Heath Street, Belsize – pretty much every road in NW3, twice daily – a show of strength in the belief in the power of education.

Which is generally a good thing.  It’s right to educate our children.  As Nelson Mandela said “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”  And Hampstead has a proud tradition as a centre for nursery, primary and secondary schooling.   

But Mandela’s militarist metaphor can feel all too apt when the area gets over-run by the school run.

With my daughter’s words ringing in my ears I turned from participant to observer in the week before half term.  

I watched the slow procession of military-style 4x4s roll in to dominate the roads and pavements, their stony-faced parent-pilots circling, hovering, waiting their opportunity to swoop into the drop-zone and release their little trooper for the perilous 10-metre dash across enemy territory to the school compound.  The tension was palpable; no one was smiling.  

At first glance those who were walking to school seemed a happier, chattier bunch.  Little wonder maybe, a slew of surveys indicate that those who trot to school on shanks’ pony arrive in better shape for the school day.  Indeed a recent experiment at a local junior school found that in a one-mile race there was an average fitness gap of one minute between those who walked and those who were chauffeured, despite the best efforts of the latter group’s parents to poison the pedestrians with particulates.

But earwigging on the conversations of those on foot revealed a more sinister truth.  Those parents who were talking to their children were usually interrogating them; either grilling them on what they would be or had been doing at school, or drilling them on their spellings and times tables.  Little wonder then that so many kids chose to hurtle ahead mounted on Razor scooters, delighting in their freedom to spread shock and awe across the pavement.  

Their anxious adults pursued at a distance, happy to deny knowledge in the event of collateral damage but quick to apportion blame elsewhere when their child incurred an injury – woe betide you if you are a third party who fails to leap out to the way!

Those parents who preferred the conversation of another adult to that of their children, and weren’t using a mobile phone, were invariably discussing school.  If their children attended the same one they’d be bemoaning its imperfections.  But were they to encounter a parent of a child from a rival school all imperfections were instantly forgotten and a game of one-upmanship ensued.  I remain flabbergasted by a voluble disagreement between two mums as to whose Year 1 daughter was receiving the superior developmental boost, the one whose school offered free violin lessons or the one offering flute!   

Apart from a few poor unfortunates possessed of helicopter parents, the older children were adult free.  But no doubt having learned from the behaviour of their primary carers during the primary school run years they behaved much the same.  

There were the Cyberkids marching down the street on stony-faced autopilot, oblivious to anything not displayed on their tablet or played through its headphones. Like the car-encased parents who yell at them to pay attention to where they are going they are aggressively defensive of their right to proceed unimpeded.   

Giving both groups a wide berth I boarded the bus and found it packed with kids from a dozen different educational establishments.  Their voluble chatter centred on the iniquities of the classroom with a fair amount of dissing of each others’ schools – all to the backbeat of a babel of mobile phones.  The tinny music and the strident statements of this uniformed cohort made the bus feel like a barracks.  

Outside the low autumn sun glinted off the blacked-out windows of a regiment of SUVs while more uniformed boys and girls marched stolidly up and down the hill.  Outriders flew by on scooters and dark-clad adults muttered into mobiles and kept a wary eye on proceedings.  

And all of a sudden I knew my daughter was right.  There was something creepy about this mass mobilisation of the reluctant to march in devotion to an absolutist drum; something reminiscent of a North Korean military parade.

Bananas, eggs, milk and trout.

Time was I didn’t need an excuse to leave the house and stroll up to The High Street, but just now I find myself dreading the prospect and putting it off for another day or until I have someone to walk with.

Why the sense of dread?

Well partly it’s the time of year; shortening days, the clocks going back and the low Autumnal sun that shines like an anglepoise lamp in the eyes.

But for the most part I’ve learned to live with these factors. No it’s a profusion of newer perils that make the 800-metre journey to the community market and back feel increasingly like a real-life game of Donkey Kong.

In general I wait for the school run traffic to clear. It’s not so much the procession of fat four-wheel drives blocking roads and walkways but the stream of wobbly toddlers on scooters hurtling down the pavements, distantly pursued by parents who will blame anyone but themselves for the inevitable accidents. It’s just too nerve-racking to contemplate.

And though the daylight is ticking away I’ll wait another hour for the dog-walkers to disperse into the nearby park. Better the occasional turd underfoot than being snapped at by Fido for carrying a stick I won’t throw.

So now the coast is clear….ish. I tap my way along my street alert for lamp-posts, which have the courtesy not to reposition themselves overnight and recycling bins, which, like Daleks, are evilly mobile and designed to cause maximum impediment to the human race. Talk about street litter!

At some point I’ll have to cross the road. Here the game changes and the stakes are higher. Electric cars – or silent death as I prefer to think of them – are an increasing feature of our streets and I know that my green heart should rejoice. But in a noisy urban environment they are inaudible, a fact their drivers all-too-often forget.

If I don’t get squashed and have counted my steps correctly I will have avoided the worst of the clutter on the High Street. If not I’ll have the tables and chairs of half a dozen pavement cafes to negotiate. Like the now ubiquitous sandwich boards outside practically every shop, this is a sign of how our pavements are being co-opted into retail space.

But there’s no time to worry about that now, I’m on the alert for Cybermen (and women). Those zombified individuals so hooked into their devices that they march down the street oblivious to anything not displayed on its screen or played through its headphones. That anyone should choose deliberately to blind and deafen themselves to the world around them amazes me. That, like some car drivers, this insulation often leaves them aggressively defensive of their right to proceed unimpeded, scares me.

Fortunately, today my Donkey Kong adventure has left me unscathed. At home, as I open the milk for a well-earned cup of tea, my heart sinks – I forgot to buy bananas.

‘A Story Worth Telling’ – Red Széll at TEDxASL