It was about this time that I decided to swim across the river. (Vile really when you think about the pollution). The idea came in the shower: Strong Body. Strong Mind. Perhaps it was the residues of something instilled by the sailor. Or the opposite: the need to break with people.

The first time I jumped in was late autumn. I’d thought it would be cold but this was everything-will-drop-off cold. Strong Body. Strong Mind. I kicked out to the other bank. But even at this narrow channel the current dragged me to the centre. Fortunately, the old lady on the barge about a mile down was very understanding and gave me a towel and a cup of tea.

When the river is like this it spews winter clot-
ted at everything with a claim to reflection. Listen,
I have carried heavy things for you            dead things.
I swallow benches no longer benches but playgrounds
for the dark daisies of the deep. I poke
statues’ eyes with reeds so they can witness
themselves disembodied. I drink up the medieval halls,
the riverside bars. I will take that old woman’s neat pile of leaves
and plaster them all through her house, leave a note on the fridge
             The trees pay homage, when the river has stolen
its archaeology, hoarding the quotidian colours as quiet
dripping treasures            somewhere high up         a bicycle wheel
a child’s sock                             a version of Shakespeare
and that unspeakable thing prized from the birch.

The river accompanied me. Water was feeding halfway across the bridge, submerging the padlocks. I had a flask and a long coat but had to curl my fingers against the Raynaud’s. The river was up to the top step at the end of my road and I was contemplating whether to go home and move my furniture, but wanted to be there to try to calculate the exact moment when he crossed from Tinder to tangible space.

He had social anxiety and had put off the first date for some time. Like me, he lived in the conditional tense. “Does your brain ever feel tight?” He’d texted. “Like swollen? Can you imagine if thoughts had a physical shape? Wrote themselves through our skin? Everyone would have a wall and each day would add bricks to make space for next week’s thoughts. If we were searching for something, a memory maybe, all we’d have to do is walk back along the wall.”

I was disappointed he didn’t materialise so we could continue this conversation. It felt like I wasn’t interesting enough for him to risk the fear. But I knew that’s not how anxiety works. Still, the blankness of my phone was infuriating. I wanted to put a face to the words. A physical face.

I dropped a stick into the water and splashed to the other side of the bridge, but the river was too fast.

I thought maybe he was a great burner of omelettes and we would have discussed how an omelette can only ever be overcooked, leading to carcinogens, or undercooked, leading to salmonella. We’d talk about how useless a non-stick frying pan is without the “non” and how mine as a result of a tussle with an overbearing cafetiere no longer cooked omelettes without holes in the middle and how it might be a good idea to patent this culinary feat dubbed the “bagel-omelette”.

Was this streaming character more immediate than the people passing in the cycle lane to whom I’d never spoken? I think realising his untouchability had a curious sensation of the opposite. A lot of what I have blogged about regarding Tinder is sadness, and although being stood up would (and did) seem that way, the experience was also incredibly freeing. Perhaps I wouldn’t have thought up these stories, had he turned up as someone else; as in Manchester, Tinder opened something creative in me. It was like light diluting shapes, everything slipping into the next.

At the end of the bridge a small terrier appeared and made its way purposefully along the benches, pushing its head between the bars. I wondered if it had seen the stick and what had happened to the owner. It didn’t have a collar. And what is it seeing when it sees its reflection? Another dog to chase?

I thought of the peculiar phenomenon of dog suicide reported at Overtoun bridge. Are dogs confronted with this same paradoxical sense of the unknowable? Psychologists called it “the other ich” or, “the call of the void”, the sudden urge to go beyond which some ignore and others don’t.

When it plunges through its reflection does it understand the air above and the water below?

Needless to say, this was how I acquired Skipper.