Features / Breakfast with Bristol24/7
Breakfast With Bristol24/7: Lindsey Cole
Dressed head to toe in colour with non-matching earrings and an impossibly wide smile, Lindsey Cole is like a beaming ray of sunshine as she bustles into the mezzanine restaurant area at the Lido on a recent morning.
As she settles herself down on a chair overlooking the shimmery waters of the swimming pool, Lindsey is quick to answer why she has chosen to breakfast here for our interview.
“Because you’re paying!” she says, honestly. “It’s a bit fancy though, which is why I’ve never been before. I tend to avoid places where you have to pay to swim.”
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Lindsey prefers her own “secret” swim spot near Beese’s along the River Avon to the costly confines of Clifton. That being said, she is definitely not a wild swimmer, finding the phrase “a bit wanky”.
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If you’re in tune with either activism or aquatics in Bristol, you’ve probably come across Lindsey who is best known for being our city’s “urban mermaid”, donning a technicolour tail and a bobble hat and swimming in rivers to highlight the poor state of water quality in and around the UK.
Lindsey, who lives in Knowle, hit international headlines when she rescued a drowning cow on a swim in the Thames in Oxfordshire to raise awareness of the “horrendous” effects of single-use plastic back in 2018.
She was turned into a cartoon in Sweden and the story was published on page three of the Sun – something that “pissed me off, actually, because journalists weren’t interested in what I was doing, until I saved the cow”.
Being an environmental campaigner is just one string to Lindsey’s bow and she says she often struggles with the fact that she is “a mesh” of so many different identities.
“I’m a children’s author, adventurer, mermaid campaigner, cyclist, environmentalist, storyteller and improv, singing and ukulele performer,” she lists.
Our server arrives and Lindsey orders Turkish baked eggs with yoghurt, walnut butter and flatbread – complementing the staff member on her tattoos and the smell of the chai latte which has just been planted in front of her.
Lindsey’s outlook on life hasn’t always been so sunny, with a tragedy in her family both a low point and impetus for her to channel her energy into something positive.
When her mum phoned her to remind her to not miss her aeroplane to Port Douglas where her parents were staying on a visit to Australia, she thought: “There’s no way I’ll do that! How do I forget to board a plane?”
Lindsey was on a travel stint in 2007, working on a banana farm in a country that had always been her dream to explore.
But she broke her ankle “jumping the fence to a festival, mud-sliding drunk” and she missed her plane from Byron Bay.
Her parents ended up spending half of a two-week holiday on the other side of the world staying at her bedside in hospital.
A few months later, Lindsey’s dad died back home in Buckinghamshire after suffering a heart attack.
It led to a dark time of self-harm and struggle for Lindsey who felt guilty her final days spent with her father were under the white glare of a medical ward rather than in the Aussie sunshine.
“When I first got back home, I didn’t know how to articulate my grief,” says Lindsey. She had not ridden a bike since she was 12 but “channelled that negative energy” into doing her first triathlon.
She may have struggled with the hills, but “when I crossed the finish line I felt euphoric and immediately signed up to cycle to Paris. The rest is history.”
Lindsey Cole is an adventurer, storyteller and Bristol’s “urban mermaid” – illustration: Lucy J Turner
That was the beginning of many wild and wacky adventures that Lindsey embarked on during her 20s, 30s and now 40s which were mostly spent living nomadically before she settled in Bristol in 2020.
From cycling the length of the UK and scaling the continent of Africa on two wheels, Lindsey has thrown herself into a life of spontaneity and adventure – connecting with hundreds of people along the way.
“I’m not very good at saying no,” she says. “So when someone invites me to do something somewhere, I find a way to meet them. I love swimming because of the connection I get to people. It makes me feel alive.”
It was when she was free diving in Indonesia that she was introduced to the shocking ubiquity of plastic in our oceans: “Trump had just got in and Brexit had just happened so I just wanted to chill out in Bali. But I cut my hand on plastic on a dive and it made me so angry and I wanted to do something about it. So I swam the length of the Thames as a mermaid.”
I ask how does living an unconventional life take its toll? “I’ve struggled with loneliness,” Lindsey admits. “I’m my own worst enemy because of my lifestyle of going on adventures. I get so impassioned by them and I spend a lot of time on my own, dreaming about them, planning them and doing them. It’s the comedown after that can be difficult.
“But saying that, I have a network of people all over the country and Ireland and Scotland that I can call on to go for a swim at any time. It’s wonderful.”
Lindsey turned to writing during lockdown, wanting to educate children about the environmental crisis in a fun and accessible way. As well as doing children’s parties, she has written two books, The Mermaid and the Cow and The Mermaid, the Otter and the Big Poo, with plans to perform the show version of the latter at Glastonbury Festival and the Edinburgh Fringe this year.
“I’m a sensitive, emotional person, and I can get overwhelmed and fatigued while campaigning. So, using joy and fun, I’ve found a way I can make a difference by interacting with kids.”
As she finishes her breakfast and orders a fresh juice, Lindsey says: “I don’t like to plan too much, so who knows what the next few years will look like for me?” One thing is for certain: they will be bursting with sunny optimism and adventure.
Illustration: Lucy J Turner
This feature was first published in Bristol24/7’s July/ August magazine
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