SWIMMINGPOD - TOM KEARNEY, ON TRANSFORMATION AND SWIMMING AT HAMPSTEAD HEATH MEN'S POND

Tom Kearney on the far left -

Tom is a Hampstead resident of over a quarter of a century and year-round swimmer at the nearby Ponds. He has a life well lived. In this podcast we talk about that life and the very special place that swimming in open water has in it. The late Al Alvarez, poet and author of the book ‘Pond Life’, Tom’s friend in Hampstead, brought him to swimming at The Ponds, something that he says has saved his life. On the eighteenth of December 2009, Tom was knocked over by a bus in London’s Oxford Street, and in a near-death coma for two weeks, making a miraculous recovery subsequently. We talk about how the accident transformed his life, and how daily swimming is central to this transformation. We talk about poetry and The Ponds. About the central importance of family, of living each day to the full. About his campaigning for bus safety in London - ‘If you shut up truth, and bury it underground it will but grow’ (Emile Zola). For Tom, campaigning and swimming outside all year round are not dissimilar - they're uncomfortable, require both physical and mental stamina, and every time you do it you achieve something that, in a different life, you'd have thought impossible. We talk about how life is serious business, but there is plenty of time for laughter, especially in relation to the East German Ladies Swimming Team (a Hampstead Men’s Pond thing), which Tom is also a central part of. Tom brims with positivity, a Hampstead intellect who swims and who appreciates all that life can offer.

Listen to the podcast here

Poetry and Prose in the Podcast

‘For the Anniversary of My Death’ by W. S. Auden

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day  

When the last fires will wave to me

And the silence will set out

Tireless traveller

Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer

Find myself in life as in a strange garment

Surprised at the earth

And the love of one woman

And the shamelessness of men

As today writing after three days of rain

Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease

And bowing not knowing to what

‘I Got Better’ - from ‘The Wrong Way to Tipperary’ by T. Kearney

Friday, 18 December 2009. Hampstead, London. 5:00 am. It’s fucking dark.  The sun comes up very late in London during winter and most days it appears not to at all.  I’ve always been an early riser and, here, summertime’s a cinch:  when the sun is high in the sky at 5am, by the time you wake up the day already has a jump start on you. 5am in December feels like you haven’t really gone to bed yet. 

‘Triple Time’ by Philip Larkin

This empty street, this sky to blandness scoured,

This air, a little indistinct with autumn

Like a reflection, constitute the present -

A time traditionally soured,

A time unrecommended by event. 

But equally they make up something else:

This is the furthest future childhood saw

Between long houses, under travelling skies,

Heard in contending bells -

An air lambent with adult enterprise, 

And on another day will be the past,

A valley cropped by fat neglected chances

That we insensately forbore to fleece.

On this we blame our last

Threadbare perspectives, seasonal decrease.  

‘Reflections on a Near Life Experience’ by Tom Kearney

I'd just do ‘all those things’ again anyway.

And because I do know now what I knew then,

Then isn't it just all the same to me, again?

Time's Arrow flies in one direction

And by the time it's time for any circumspection

The moment's passed, it's now the past

And all we perceive’s just a pale reflection

So breathe in deeply, Carpe Diem

Moments are fleeting, gone before we see'em

Tempus fugit…Optima dies  

Let's take the plunge and forsake our near lives.

‘I Sleep a Lot’ by Czeslaw Milosz

I sleep a lot and read St. Thomas Aquinas

Or The Death of God (that's a Protestant book).

To the right the bay as if molten tin,

Beyond the bay, city, beyond the city, ocean,

Beyond the ocean, ocean, till Japan.

To the left dry hills with white grass,

Beyond the hills an irrigated valley where rice is grown,

Beyond the valley, mountains and Ponderosa pines,

Beyond the mountains, desert and sheep.

When I couldn't do without alcohol, I drove myself on alcohol,

When I couldn't do without cigarettes and coffee, I drove myself

On cigarettes and coffee.

I was courageous. Industrious. Nearly a model of virtue.

But that is good for nothing.

I feel a pain.not here. Even I don't know.

many islands and continents,

words, bazaars, wooden flutes,

Or too much drinking to the mirror, without beauty,

Though one was to be a kind of archangel

Or a Saint George, over there, on St. George Street.

Please, Doctor,

Not here.

No, Maybe it's too

Unpronounced

Please, Medicine Man, I feel a pain.

I always believed in spells and incantations.

Sure, women have only one, Catholic, soul,

But we have two. When you start to dance

You visit remote pueblos in your sleep

And even lands you have never seen.

Put on, I beg you, charms made of feathers,

Now it's time to help one of your own.

I have read many books but I don't believe them.

When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers.

I remember those crosses with chiseled suns and moons

And wizards, how they worked during an outbreak of typhus.

Send your second soul beyond the mountains, beyond time.

Tell me what you saw, I will wait.