Artist to swim across London

We will be swimming, cross-London, with the aid of a London Routemaster bus. Fifty of us or so, in assorted swimwear and with varying competence, attempting to negotiate the city by alternative means. What can it mean? Like all events we today frame as art or somehow distantly related to art, meaning falls to words in search of some kind of rescue. Kinds of aqua-Flaneurs who punctuate the times with nostalgia for this high-point in design history. The red double-decker plays on minds, at first confusing the red with the blue of the water – we take a red bus to get to the blue, to shake off the blues and even flee those ‘screaming reds’ – and yet the nostalgia claws out a sense of childhood, memories of something lost and passing, nascent and maternal, baptismal and gasping, as we sodden few finally find ourselves displaced between the lone subjectivity of swimming (a world of my own) and the shared public space of the bus (who sits next to me? who sat before?).