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Summary

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

• Biography & Memoirs