The gentle warming of the sea during summer makes September the finest month for swimming outdoors. When I bathed at Waxham beach in Norfolk recently, the only other beast in the water was a common seal, which broke the limpid water to regard me with bulging brown eyes.

This, for me at least, was a delightful surprise, but I fear for any seal coming up for air by Bournemouth pier late last Thursday: it would’ve come face-to-face with the bulging brown eyes of Nigel Farage.

The former Ukip leader marked his retirement with what his swimming partner and Leave.EU founder Arron Banks describes as a drunken skinny-dip.

I’ve long laboured under the misapprehension that those who appreciate the supreme sensory pleasure of wild swimming must be enlightened poets of wild places – Byron, Shelley, Roger Deakin.

When I read of David Cameron’s “labrador-like” love of plunging into cold lochs, I even warmed to our former PM, who certainly channels his inner seal when sporting a wetsuit.

Farage says his midnight dip was not his first sea swim and nor, ominously, will it be his last. At this rate, we’ll be lucky to find a stretch of cold water without a retired politician washing away their sins in it. Nick Clegg loves wild swimming so much he “taught” William Hague to swim in the lake at Chevening, the grace-and-favour stately home they once shared. Presumably Tony Blair just can’t stop bathing off the wonderful former coal beaches of County Durham.

For the record, Farage insists his underpants stayed on. No matter: the joyful pastime of wild swimming has been set back for a generation.

Lost trains of thought



A member of station staff dressed as an elf for a Christmas promotion at Marylebone station, terminus of one of our lost railway lines. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

This time last year, I walked the route of HS2 from London to Birmingham to gauge its impact on local people. The quietly beautiful middle of England is full of old battlegrounds and ghost projects. There’s Cublington, a village once earmarked for London’s third airport, and the ruins of the Great Central Main Line, which ran from Sheffield to Marylebone and closed in the 1960s.

Then there’s HS2, no mile of which yet exists but which increasingly resembles a zombie project. HS2’s chief executive, Simon Kirby, recently quit and critics say HS2 is deliberately spending (£2bn so far) to make it harder to cancel. At £55.7bn and rising – nine times per mile more expensive than the French TGV network – HS2 achieves the impossible: it makes £18bn Hinkley look like a bargain.

We are a small country requiring more trains – not more speed. I regularly travel by (slow) train and appreciate the writing window it provides; Wi-Fi enables many others to work effectively on trains, provided we can get a seat.

HS2 will provide extra capacity but far more could be delivered by spreading its billions across the network. And the railway-that-never-was would make a wonderful long-distance footpath.

Badgering graffiti



The fate of Devon badgers facing culling prompted a forthright exchange of graffiti on one local bus shelter. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PA

The fact that badgers are being shot in seven new locations in western England is barely mentioned nationally. In the cull zones themselves, however, this controversial policy is occasionally lightened by black humour.

Graffiti artist Mau Mau recently painted “Save the badgers, cull the Tories” on a bus shelter at Buck’s Cross, north Devon. A less artistic local graffitied alongside: “Save a hedgehog, kill a badger”. Then anti-cullers struck back with: “Save our badgers, sab the cull” – encouraging people to join hunt saboteurs’ direct action, which is mostly trashing of badger traps.

The last word was this unfortunate message: “Save baders [sic], cull inbreds”. I’m a poor speller writing in a newspaper famed for its typos so I’ll presume it was very dark in Buck’s Cross that night.