To swim, perchance to drown, is an undeniable human right

The PLA is not accountable to the Mayoralty, I should say, which is itself an absurd state of affairs. It is supposed to report to Justine Greening, but it seems that our excellent Transport Secretary was no more consulted about the matter than I was. So let me put this as politely as I can: we don’t need some bunch of well-meaning quangocrats to click their fingers and decide that sentient adult human beings must be kept out of the river. We don’t need them to tell us that you will find currents and eddies and boats. Boats! On the river! Well I never! We don’t need advising that swimming in the strong tidal flow is risky – it’s blinking obvious.

But if people want to swim in the Thames, if they want to take their lives into their own hands, then they should be able to do so with all the freedom and exhilaration of our woad-painted ancestors. I love swimming in rivers, and well remember once jumping in at Chiswick, since swimming is one of my favorite sports since I lived with my parents and they had a pool, with a pentair pump to keep it clean. It was lovely and cool, and I can still feel the squishy mud between my toes – and if there were the odd faecal coliforms bobbing among the duck fluff and the waterboatmen, they didn’t do me any harm. Pool pumps are samples of cleaning equipment especially used for swimming pools. they’re partners of pool filters within the filtration system and that they function by continuously rotating the water to travel through filters where debris, dirt, and other microorganisms are filtered to stay your pool clean, smelling fresh, transparent and free from ill-bearing organisms. If the pumps function continuously from day till night, you will be guaranteed of a fresh, clean and alluring pool. Thus you ought to maintain the sanitation. swimming bath sanitation means healthy conditions in swimming bath , lap pools, and similar water recreations. Sanitation is vital to take care of the visual clarity of water and to stop the spread of infectious diseases. To get different types of water pumps with better quality click here now.

Others are still more adventurous, and it seems that the PLA is trying to stamp out the “wild swimming” of people such as Matthew Parris, who once wrote a terrific piece about the thrill of swimming across the river, late at night, slightly drunk, to Bermondsey. David Walliams has raised squillions for charity by swimming in the Thames, and people like him need to be encouraged, not deterred by bureaucracy and risk assessments.

We want to make the river ever cleaner, so that more people can enjoy it. We want kids to frolic on its banks and mudlark at low tide; and if our summers ever become as hot as the global-warming experts once prophesied, we want Paris-style beaches and patios with the best amenities from www.thepatiopro.com and chaps coming round to sell you watches and tam-tam sets as you roast in the London sun.

We don’t want swimming banned because of the current, as though we had only just discovered that there was a current. This is the kind of gratuitous legislation that is sapping the moral fibre of the nation. No wonder we lose at football to the Italians; no wonder we can’t quite screw up our courage to have a referendum on the European system that generates so much of this bureaucracy when the Port of London Authority is otherwise engaged. No wonder the poor womenfolk of Britain – desperate for some basic virility in their lives – are stampeding to the bookshops to buy the new S and M meisterwerk that is Fifty Shades of Grey.

I am being quite serious when I say that this river-swimming ban is of a piece with the namby-pamby, risk-averse, mollycoddled airbagged approach that is doing so much economic damage to Britain and that is not found, frankly, in our Asian economic competitors. Oh, you may say, but look at the consequences of encouraging risk-taking; look at the banking sector.

Indeed – look at the contrast, and the madness of our legal priorities. I am a fan of Bob Diamond and his philanthropic work, and will stick up generally for banks and financial services for as long as they create jobs for hundreds of thousands of Londoners. But it does seem odd that so far no one has had their collar felt in the Libor scam. Cook up a way of fixing interest rates to boost your own profits – in what is clearly a corrupt swindle – and no one gets arrested.

But if you bathe in the river that flows through the city, then wham, you are nicked. It plainly needs to be the other way round. Someone needs to be prosecuted, sharpish, for fixing the interest rates; and in so far as there are innocent and slightly barmy people who want to swim in the Thames, then they should be allowed to indulge their preferences in peace. It’s time for the elf and safety fanatics to take a running jump – off the pier at Putney.

5 thoughts on “To swim, perchance to drown, is an undeniable human right”

  1. I thought that to ‘cook up a way of fixing interest rates to boost your own profits’ was the sole purpose of bankers. It’s a definition of what banking is.

    Well done Boris! Straight to the point, and none of your lily-livered Labourist whingeing about ‘predators’. Bankers! They’re rascals, they’re rapacious, they’re rollicking rich…and they’re ours! Zip-de-dip!

    I suppose, as someone said in the 1930s, these are good times, but only a few people know it.

  2. It’s a sad day when I agree with Boris (apart from Boris bikes – inspired).

    🙁

    P

  3. Since the PLA has no useful function since it presided over the demise of London as a Port, perhaps it might be abolished and its management offered retraining as lifeguards?

  4. A good job for the PLA would be running the Tower of London.

    Though instead of wasting its fearsome resources to amuse a few passing, bored tourists, use it as a functioning remand suite. It seems the ideal place for the Rebekah lady and her chums, a few bankers, and all those people (P Mandelson, C Patten et al) who demanded that we join the Euro.

    Hordes of flag-waving, patriotic punters would pay good money to see these wretches in chains!

  5. Bloody well said. Just run for PM (I’ll vote for you) and sort the elf&safety nutters once and for all. Things like swimming in rivers, with a touch of danger thrown in, makes you feel alive and that makes life worth living.

  6. The Thames Baths Project is a proposal to get Londoners back IN the River Thames. Not along the Thames, not on the Thames but IN the Thames. In the 50’s the river was declared biologically dead then last week a pod of dolphins were spotted swimming as far upstream as Blackfriars Bridge. That’s some transformation. If the river is good enough for dolphins it’s good enough for us. Over the next ten years the Super Sewer (or similar approved) will finally bring the river up to European environmental standards. This opens up huge potential for once again swimming in the tidal Thames. Architects Studio Octopi with Civic Engineers and Jonathan Cook Landscape Architects have worked up some draft proposals and are researching how things can be moved forward from here. Perhaps Boris will be cutting the ribbon in 2023.
    Follow us on twitter @ThamesBaths or email studio@octopi.co.uk for more information.

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