July 28, 2010
Jackie Cobell doesn’t look like a star. A council foster carer, she doesn’t have a glamorous job, and at fifty six years old, she’s so fat she’s had a gastric band fitted. All in all she just doesn’t fit your usual image of a cute, young, fake-tanned, TV celebrity.
But a celebrity is exactly what she is ‒ a real celebrity in its truest sense. That is to say, she’s someone who has done something worthy of being celebrated. Because last weekend, against all the odds placed on her by her age and size, she swam the English Channel.
She didn’t do it because she’s a fantastically accomplished Olympic swimmer. She isn’t. She’s just a happy amateur. And, though they may have called her Flipper when she was a schoolgirl, because she enjoyed swimming so much, she took so long to reach France from Dover that she broke the wrong kind of record.
If there’d been a wooden spoon she would have got it as the slowest person, using nothing but muscle power, ever to make it across to France. But that hardly mattered. Her real achievement was in her courage, determination and endurance.
Taking nearly twenty nine hours to cross the Straits of Dover, she was dragged and buffeted by tides and currents so much, that she ended up zig-zagging through 65 miles of turbulent sea, instead of gliding through the twenty one miles that is the shortest route.
And when, after just eight hours of her double marathon-plus-some, her left arm became useless as a result of an earlier injury, she didn’t give in to the mental siren calls which must surely have been urging her to clamber into the warm blankets of the support boat and accept failure. She swam on and on for another 21 hours…one armed.
Her grit, maybe even her stubbornness, call it what you will, were astonishing as she ploughed on through the water, all through one day, then on through the night, and on again into the next day. Just think about it. On and on, face down in the water, lifting her head to breathe only every three or four strokes. She may have trained for five years for this moment, but it’s still daunting just to imagine.
So, why did she do it? Well, it wasn’t because she liked showing off, or because she wanted to be famous. I suspect the thought of fame never crossed her mind, although she’s certainly famous now.
She isn’t a rich, spoilt teenager who at sixteen convinces foolish parents to allow her to sail around the world, and ends up having to be rescued in mid-ocean. She wouldn’t understand that world.
Her role in life is as a carer and giver, and what she did was for others, for charity, raising more than £2000 for research into Huntington’s Disease for her swim.
Yes, she admitted, as on dry land she began to recover, there were moments of doubt in mid-Channel. “But I just kept thinking of all the people I would let down if I stopped.”
We should mark those words well. She didn’t want to let anyone down. She didn’t.
Her experience is unique, but anyone who has taken on any kind of personal challenge, no matter how tiny and irrelevant, will marvel at her determination. I remember as a sixteen year old boy on a school camping holiday, when, sharing a tent with some hulking great rugby players, two of whom went on to play for England, I alone decided to swim across the widest bit of Coniston Water.
To a good, strong swimmer it would, I imagine, be no big deal. But I was an eight stone weakling who’d never swum further than a length in Southport open air pool before, and, at the place we were camping, Coniston must have been more than a mile wide. It was certainly as cold as a glacier.
But, once started at my delicate breast stroke, and very quickly having serious misgivings about the venture, I just couldn’t give up. That would have been to let myself down and to have failed the other boys who were in the rowing boat urging me on.
Eventually reaching the other side of the lake I was so cold and exhausted I couldn’t stand and had to crawl on my hands and knees out of the water and be lifted bodily into the boat. But I’d done it.
Not surprisingly the teachers in charge, who’d been absent when I’d set off, were, quite rightly, furious with worry when I got back, and put me to bed covered in blankets and hot water bottles. But, in an otherwise undistinguished boyhood, I’d proved something to myself.
Jackie Cobell proved something to herself, too. But, more than that, she proved something to us all. In a hi-tech, entertainment soaked world, where instant fame for its own sake has become as vapid a career ambition as is imaginable, she showed that without true achievement and purpose life in meaningless.
This is not necessarily to criticise those to whom celebrity has become an end in itself. They didn’t create the world that is sold to them every time they turn on a television or computer, where looks and glamour are seen as easy, exciting, sexy stepping stones out of dull toil and mundane obscurity.
It isn’t their fault that they are force-fed continuous distraction by way of repetitive computer games, where virtual prizes are little more than questionable rewards for childhoods spent in darkened rooms staring at flashing images.
If we worry that many young people grow up misunderstanding the meaning of real achievement, let’s remember that perhaps we, too, should share not a little of the responsibility for this.
And let us applaud and reward with our admiration the examples set by people like Jackie Cobell and comedian Eddie Izzard, who ran the length and breadth of the country until his septic feet bled with pus and he was catatonic with fatigue.
And remember that they, and many other unsung good people like them, do it all for charity and to prove to themselves that life just doesn’t consist of comfort and entertainment, that there is an inner need within us that needs satisfying, too.
Jackie Cobell miscalculated when she left Dover at just after half past six last Saturday morning. She’d trained by swimming up and down Lake Windermere and thought that by doubling the time taken and adding a bit for the Channel currents, she would be in France by that night.
She was way out. But that didn’t stop her. She showed that life is about overcoming challenges, even unexpected ones, by preparation and endeavour, that there are no short cuts. In her case her journey actually turned out to be nothing but long detours, but she kept on keeping on, the mantra in her head being an old Spencer Davies hit, slightly changed to “Keep on Swimming”.
As she swam she would have known that no matter how hard she tried there could be no guarantee that endeavour would bring success. Her epic swim wasn’t like that and life isn’t like that. Her body might well have just given up on her and her husband might had have to haul her into the support boat. But she would have known, too, that if is she gave in, failure was guaranteed. That, it would seem, was not an option.
I don’t know who will be in the next honours list. But as much as anyone, Jackie Cobell deserves something. Not for her swim. Swimming is her hobby and she obviously loves it. But for the determination she showed, and the terrific example she set to us all over last weekend.
For that, Jackie Cobell is more than an inspiration called Flipper. She’s a star.
