Surf Nation

Surfing in the time of Coronavirus (is not great)

I'm all for people getting their exercise during lockdown but I can't but feel that going surfing is taking the mick, even if you live close enough to walk to a beach.

 

I'm lucky enough to be in that category and could have paddled out today for a low-to-mid tide 2ft wave at my local spot. I won't name it, not because it's a secret spot (far from it) but because I don't want to criticise the handful of surfers who were there. I'm sure they live nearby too, and felt, like the windsurfer at the same spot on Saturday (who got himself into trouble and had, ignominiously, to regain the land via, er, a tunnel), that it was legit to take their hour of exercise by riding waves.

 

But here's the thing. Against the corona-hell backdrop, surfing is a case of too much fun in a time of no fun.

 

The ever-excellent Matt Warshaw summed it up in his Sunday Joint (if you don't subscribe, do):

 

Two weeks ago in the Joint I suggested that the silver lining for surfers during COVID is that we'd get to ride this thing out in the ocean. I was wrong. The science argues against it, for starters. Beyond that, surfing is no longer ethically or morally defensible. If we're all grounded, we're all grounded. In non-pandemic times, I will defend to the death your right to be a selfish prick of a surfer, and at some point in our vaccinated future I will drop a Selfish Prick Surfer list in which I will unabashedly place myself in the back half of the Top 10. But not now. Not under these conditions. Don't look for the loophole, the angle, the surf-related hustle. Us vs Them is no longer in play. This is Us vs Virus.

If you want a haircut from a surfer...

It pays to read the small print (in Penzance, anyway). 

Not Surfing is OK

 

This is a fascinating interview with Matt Warshaw on quitting surfing.

It prompted a lot of thoughts, not least 'At last! Someone else! Someone who understands!'

I haven't quit surfing. Of course I haven't. It's just that, er, I don't really surf anymore. There are various reasons:

1. I lost my confidence after neck surgery 10 years ago;
2. Even when I battled to get it back, other injuries came along. I broke two ribs surfing about seven years ago, and I now have a shoulder that's so wrecked (from skate-related dislocations in my youth) that I'm expecting total shoulder replacement surgery;
3. Four or five years ago I went through a mid-life upheaval which left me (a) broke and (b) with a gorgeous daughter.

These things conspire to make the choice between earning money and being with my daughter, against going for a confidence-bereft surf which will literally result in physical pain, no contest.

But as Matt put it a couple of weeks back in his very readable EoS blog, if you step away from surfing, people will say you were never a real surfer. Your heart wasn't ever in it. You weren't the real deal. You were a pretender.

Imagine saying this of a footballer. Just an amateur one, not a pro:

"I hear that Alex Wade isn't turning out for the Dynamo Choughs anymore. Or even playing five-a-side. Not in Cornwall or in London. Nowhere. He is simply not on any pitch."

"Really? Well, it doesn't surprise me. I don't think he ever really was a footballer."

"I agree. Granted, he played the game since he was 11, for his schools, university and local sides wherever he lived, but he wasn't really playing football."

"Exactly. He was pretending."

"Just like that bloke - what's his name?"

"David Beckham?"

"Yes, that's him. Played all those games for England, and then stopped. Just stopped playing!"

"And therefore forfeited any right to be described as a footballer."

"And revealed that, all along, he was pretending."

But I haven't quit surfing. I'm still a surfer. It's just that I don't get in much. If at all. 

And you know what? Not surfing is OK.

Pictured courtesy of Mike Newman: someone pretending to have been boxing training. Who never really boxed.

 

Respect

At last! A wave for Wade

It's been a long time since I wrote here. 

The reason?

Being a dad again. My daughter Maud is The Best (biased dad, me?) but, aged 52, I'd forgotten how small people take up every available minute of free time.

Having no time meant that last week's rare foray into the surf was super-sweet. I even remembered how to ride a wave. Just.

 

Obituary of Surfer founder John Severson in The Times

Pleased to get this obit of Surfer magazine founder John Severson away in The Times.

Severson was a sharp, charismatic and talented guy; good with words and images; a fine surfer and a family man. He figured out something that many of us would envy: how to make money when young, then quit a conventional job and live life on his terms - in Hawaii, surfing and painting. The photo here, of Greg Noll at Pipeline, is one of his most famous.

Thanks, as ever, to Matt Warshaw for his help.

Law Firm Offices Do Not Blossom

For the past four or five years, I've been involved in some corporate copywriting for two very large organisations. This work came to an end on Wednesday this week. One of the entities had taken its outsourced writing in-house a few months ago, the other decided it wanted a different approach to its copywriting needs as March came to a close. It therefore bid adieu to the agency that had, in turn, contracted me.

Finding out that this throughput of work was coming to an end might have been stressful. After all, it helped pay the bills. But life is curious. No sooner had I been told the gig would be ending, than a ton of other work landed - interesting, rewarding, exciting work with pleasant people.

And today, I remembered an admonition. I'd written a piece about how the second of the two businesses had opened a new office somewhere. As is the way of this kind of writing, everything has to be on the up; negatives are disallowed. And so, having been informed about how the new office was going great guns (so soon after its opening), I wrote something like:

Already our new office in Lima is blossoming.

The admonition asked me to rewrite that phrase. The reason?

"Law firm offices do not blossom".

 

Finnegan's non-Wake

I'm halfway through William Finnegan's Barbarian Days. Yes, this book came out about two years ago. I got there in the end. But not to the end. Yet.

But I will finish this book. It's what scribes of back-cover blurb call "a compulsive read". 

Why? Because of the blend of tone (down to earth, unforced), credibility (Finnegan put the hours in, both to writing and surfing) and style (sick of "sick" as the adjective de rigueur in surfing? Unstoked by people who are stoked? In need of something that might really be "epic", rather than a stale imitation? Finnegan is the answer). 

The book is arguably the best map of surfing's evolution from the early 60s to the present day yet written. Finnegan was there at the beginning, in epicentres like Hawaii and California (initially riding longboards). He was swept up by the shortboard revolution before heading off on The Search ahead of its colonisation as a marketing term. He got to ride Tavarua before it became a tourist resort (have they now killed the snakes there, to make it user-friendly, I wonder?), spent time in the Lucky Country and snagged waves in Bali, various African countries and Madeira, as well as a whole load of places in between. 

My trajectory through life mirrors Finnegan's not in the sense that I ever became anything to write home about as a surfer, but thanks to the places we visited. I imagine this is the same for many surfers. Of whatever level - hotshot, kook, somewhere in between - the chances are that we'll visit the same places, at some time or another. 

Another similarity is that Finnegan read constantly on his trips here and there. With some 240 pages of Barbarian Days to go, I sense that the book doubles as a memoir not just of a surfing life but of a writer's, too. And like Finnegan, everywhere I went I had a book on the go; to read (and learn) was as important as to see (and surf). 

We also both like Joyce, although unlike Finnegan I haven't read Finnegans Wake. Thanks to his excellent book, I feel it's time to revisit the Irish master - and to find the time, so elusive thanks to work and all the things that add up to life, for surfing again. 

 

 

 

Obituary of Chris Tyler, Skewjack founder and entrepreneur, in The Times

Pleased to get a couple of pieces away in The Times recently - one in the Sport section last Saturday on surfing and the Olympics, the other an obituary on the legendary Chris Tyler, in the paper today. Always an honour to write obits, especially this one of Cass and Essex's dad. 

TLS review of Amazing Surfing Stories

My third non-fiction book, Amazing Surfing Stories, came out in September 2012. Remarkably, it's taken till now for me to realise that it was (nicely) reviewed in The Times Literary Supplement. Here's what Josh Raymond said:

Agatha Christie’s heroine Anne Bedingfield, in The Man in the Brown Suit, said of surfing: “you are either vigorously cursing or idiotically pleased with yourself”. Christie herself was keen on the sport, and one of the entries in Alex Wade’s Amazing Surfing Stories playfully speculates that when she disappeared for eleven days in December 1926 she was in fact riding the waves at Bridlington, on the Yorkshire coast.

Surfing offers danger, communion with nature and the possibility of high-speed grace, all without the hassle and expense of ski lifts, and, as with many “extreme” sports, discussion among its enthusiasts can oscillate between self-satisfation and incomprehensibility. It is therefore especially pleasing that Wade’s second book on the subject, following Surf Nation (2008), is so accessible and diverting.

There are a great many stories here, all short and true. We hear about world championships, shark attacks and three-wave holddowns, drug addictions, a stranding and the feeling of riding “Jaws” – one of the world’s most destructive waves – at night. The language is at once literary and idiomatic. “Stoked”, “amped” and “gnarly” could sit uneasily alongside “terrible grandeur” and
the “reeling perfection of Thurso East”, but Wade comes across as so steeped in respect for the ocean that the overriding impression
is of authenticity. A thirteen-year-old girl who continued to surf competitively after her arm was bitten off by a shark says simply,
“people in car crashes don’t stop driving”.

The book succeeds through a confluence of subject matter and structure. Some of these stories will transport us, others may pass us
by, and the feeling is eerily akin to that of surfing itself. Wade achieves a subtly different moral note in each piece, and even those dealing with death or suicide feel bound by a spirit of generosity and the value of saying “yes”.

It is a pity that Wiley Nautical do the author few favours. The layout is unwieldy, typographical errors lurk like sea urchins, and the
book went to press before an exuberant reference to Lance Armstrong could be cut. Fortunately these detract no more than do bumps and grazes after a day among the waves.