Pondlife
A Swimmer's Journal
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:9th Apr '15
Should be back in stock very soon

From the author of The Savage God, a unique memoir of growing old, and a lesson in not going gently into that good night
The ponds of Hampstead Heath are small oases; fragments of wild nature nestled in the heart of north-west London. For the best part of his life Al Alvarez – poet, critic, novelist, rock-climber and poker player – has swum in them almost daily.
An athlete in his youth, Alvarez chronicles what it is to grow old with humour and fierce honesty – from his relentlessly nagging ankle which makes daily life a struggle, to infuriating bureaucratic battles with the council to keep his disabled person’s Blue Badge, the devastating effects of a stroke, and the salvation he finds in the three Ss – Swimming, Sex and Sleep.
As Alvarez swims in the ponds he considers how it feels when you begin to miss that person you used to be – to miss yourself. Swimming is his own private form of protest against the onslaught of time; proof to others, and himself, that he’s not yet beaten.
By turns funny, poetic and indignant, Pondlife is a meditation on love, the importance of life’s small pleasures and, above all, a lesson in not going gently in to that good night.
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'A beautiful unfolding of a story, told in deceptively simple prose but with a great power to move' Sunday Times
'The adrenalin still flows in lively extracts' The Times
'A marvellous book... it has no business to be as invigorating and absorbing – its success is against the odds' Observer
The adrenalin still flows in lively extracts from 11 years of journals * The Times *
A beautiful unfolding of a story, told in deceptively simple prose but with a great power to move * Sunday Times *
A marvellous book. Even the title Pondlife is spot-on: unlaboured, light and right. But it has no business to be as invigorating and absorbing – its success is against the odds * Observer *
Al Alvarez is a writer’s writer whose brilliant insight has illuminated everything from suicide to his love of poker ... A miniature classic of a man’s defiant assertion against ageing * Metro *
ISBN: 9781408841020
Dimensions: 198mm x 128mm x 24mm
Weight: 260g
288 pages