Roger Cox (2025) The View From the Shoulder: A Portrait of Scottish Surfing.

Scotland and surfing is an oxymoron like sunbathing on Mars. I’m with Billy Connolly on that one. The North Sea can wait. You go in feeling blue and you come out bluer. If the cold doesn’t get you, the midges or clegs will as I know from experience. Rodger Cox is made of sterner stuff than Jaws. He’s been writing about surfing in The Scotsman since 2005. The View From the Shoulder is apparently when you’re up on your board, riding that wave. And you have a quick look over your shoulder to see if God is behind you and how long you’ve got to live.

Well, you know what I mean. Here’s a selection of his articles. Those peely-wally bodies that ‘dared to dream’ and the £60 million Edinburgh investment in wave machines and the cold-water sport industry that has grown around them. A mainstream sport? I’m unconvinced or simply prejudiced. I maybe should give it a go. A long wave from Ben Larg, from the pristine sands of Tiree... who just finished third in the world at the Big Wave Challenge at Nazaré in Portugal to his forefathers, the ‘coffin-lid surfers of Machrihanish’ from the 1930s.

‘In 1968 I found a company that sold neoprene rubber with drawings of how to cut out a wetsuit. It was more or less a diving wetsuit though, with a big flap at the front with buttons.  It was extremely uncomfortable, but it was warmer than not having a wetsuit.’ Bill Batten, Scottish surfing pioneer, Shackleton’s Bar, Edinburgh, 2018.

Free-thinkers. Hippies Outcasts from the mainstream. You get the drift.

‘While experienced surfers may find themselves wondering why Flanagan didn’t simply look for a nice beachbreak to learn on (at one point in the book he does exactly that, and suddenly starts to find life much easier) it’s impossible not to admire his sheer, bloody-minded determination, paddling out into the North Atlantic week after week, year after year, only to be pum melled by ten-foot walls of water and washed back to the beach with his confidence in tatters. His honesty, too, is admirable, both when describing the fear he feels when things go wrong and when analysing his reasons for trying to accomplish something that most people seem to think is nuts. And when he finally finds himself skimming across the open face of a wave at Skaill, following various injuries, near-death-experiences and long, dark nights of the soul, and is reduced ‘almost to tears’ by the experience – well, you’d have to be a hard-hearted reader not to find yourself welling up a little too’.

‘Wade discovered that there were indeed some surf scribes worth reading, ranging from Mark Twain, Herman Melville and Jack London in the early days, to Tom Wolfe in the 1960s, Kem Nunn in the 1980s, Dan Duane in the 1990s and Tim Winton in the 2000s. Surfing’s literary tradition, he concluded, was ‘sparse, but notable’.’

Read on.    

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CVBVVGD6