Guides to the best wild swimming in Britain are like buses. None for years, then two in a month. It's not quite a trend but we could pretend it is, couldn't we, please, because wild swimming is the one thing that can make everything all right again. No really. It's the thing we've lost in all the health-and-safety tape and the chlorine. We have boxed ourselves into a million turquoise rectangles. Both these books reignite that basic desire to run to the nearest riverbank, tear off all your clothes and jump in. Then jump out again because it's f-f-f-f-f-freezing.

Wild Swim, bus number one, describes the entering of wild waters as a passport to a different world, or worlds. A touch hyperbolic, but bus number two, Wild Swimming, goes further, citing the naturalist Sir Alistair Hardy's evolutionary theory that being in water is more than just a pleasure, it is at the core of the human condition. “During the 10m years of Pliocene world droughts, while our species was busy evolving into uprightness, we did not, suggests Hardy, choose the arid deserts of Africa as our home, but the more tempting shallows of the nearby Indian Ocean. Our subsequent life on dry land is a relatively recent and bereft affair.”

As a child, and by child I mean a twenty-something, I used to jump into all sorts of streams, waterfalls, rivers and lakes. I would be one of the shivering fools emerging from the waves off Hove beach in January (okay March), thrilled to have survived, giddy with the sheer eccentric joy of it, convinced I was Aquaman. We once booked a beach house in Pembrokeshire so we could skinny dip all week. When we found the “beach house” was two miles from the sea, we didn't call to register a complaint. We stripped off, ran those two miles, past a couple of pubs and a bingo hall, and jumped in. At night. In October. It's probably the most liberated I ever felt, which is, in retrospect, depressing.

Now, I sit in the shallow end of my public pool each Saturday watching my son battle over the inflatables with a thousand other weeing, screaming toddlers, patrolled by twitchy lifeguards, hemmed in by the no-running, no-jumping, no-breathing signs. It's not the same.

We have no excuses. As Kate Rew explains in Wild Swim, our waterways aren't filthy any more...in 1957, for instance, a survey found that only eels were managing to survive in the Thames. If you were to swim in it now (which she highly recommends), you would spot more than 100 different species of fish. It's always comforting to see other living things in the water - jellyfish excepted. And pike.

As for the fear factor...both books come armed with the sort of safety precautions that are sensible rather than local council gone mad. The accident statistics reveal that jumping into unknown depths while drunk seems to be the main killer. Avoid that urge and you'll be fine.

The only thing left to worry about now is which guidebook to buy because, again like buses, you can't get both. Each one is packed with the sort of elegiac photography of boys on rope swings, laughter, swimmers in reeds and algae-green ponds that will sustain you all the way into the water, past the toe-dipping point of no return. Wild Swim feels more like something for the neatly arranged coffee table of an armchair wild swimmer. It is hardback and not particularly splashproof, and Rew's first-person tales of her aquatic adventures are a bit too personal. She is a flipping good swimmer, literally, and in her enthusiasm she has trouble holding back to the level of the not particularly wild swimmer. She likes industrial swims, island-to-island kilometres and hitching rides on currents and the like. It is inspirational enough to keep you rooted to that armchair. Wild Swimming is more of a manual. It, too, has plenty of inspiration but also includes grid-references, guidebooky boxes and clear, third-person, no-nonsense information. It also tells you how to build a riverside sauna, and I can't imagine anything more perfect that that.

So I'd go for Wild Swimming. The only problem is that a lot of other people will as well. This book comes from the same stable as the Cool Camping series. It, too, was zeitgeisty, but today you'll struggle to get a weekend pitch in the campsites featured in the original guide. The great thing about wild swimming is that you shouldn't be surrounded by lots of other wild bathers. Mind you, there are 150 swims to chose from (compared to 108 in Wild Swim). Both volumes equip you well to strike out on your own, which is after all the whole point.

Maybe get both books, so you know where all the other wild swimmers are headed. Or neither. Why not just go for it? Screw the system. To hell with being sensible. Find some water and jump in. Check for shopping trolleys first, though.

Wild Swim by Kate Rew
270608Guardian Books £16.99 pp223 Buy the book from Books First £15.29 including free delivery
Wild Swimming by Daniel Start
Punk Publishing £14.95 pp256 Buy the book from Books First £13.46 including free delivery

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