LXVSWIM

The weather was hot enough to want to murder someone. Early summer 2020 was the hottest on record for the UK, and after a day inside of...

Of the most regular, everyday swimming places for me, ever since I realised that I didn’t need to drive hours to the coast to get a ‘good...

As with lock down, there is not a right time to unlock. An epidemiologist at Harvard recently compared epidemics with house fires –the...

There are more bubbles on the water than ever before. This is a good thing – under Covid-19 guidelines, there is a new verb – ‘to...

As lock-down eases, somewhat uneasily, there was a moonlight swim locally. With Kristie, Judy, Jeremy, and Pauline, in a new-rules group...

Abba is the happy-music that pops up when I am happy. Life somehow is less than surreal, but it could go from stage two back to stage one...

“First of May! First of May, Outdoor ****ing starts today”. Rumpole of the Bailey, a fictional lawyer, a character in every sense of the...

I woke up this morning with the number 888 in my head. On Sunday 19th April, Pauline woke me with a cup of tea and “888”. I like numbers,...

If I were writing a letter to my beloved outdoor swimming, it might start ‘My dear Port Meadow…’. It would be written long-hand, with...

Today, work continues in a stutter-state of conference calls, Zoom, Skype, Teams, Hang Out, the local-to-Oxford platforms; I never...

This is a new world, somehow surreal and strange, new yet not new to the world. Surreal. With surrealism, dream-like states allow fish to...

The loneliness of the social-distanced swimmer. I miss you all, and it’s only been a week or so. Pauline and I are nostalgic about the...

I was to have been in Italy this week, at the Slow Food Foundation. I have work there two sometimes three times a year. It is always...

New Year’s Day and all are dipping after promising, resolving to do dry January. The United States and Canada have their polar bear...

This one was unexpected, but should not have been. Emma had a swim-aversary, she had swum every day for a year. Every single day,...

The Christmas period 2019 was a special period for swimming and dipping. When the swims were so perfect in their own way and the...

Dodo – December Outdoor Dip Oxford; Dip Outdoor December Oxford; December Oxford Dip Outdoors. I am never sure how it goes, but however...

Port Meadow, Oxford in the morning, Hammersmith in the evening. Changing by the dodo tree in Oxford and watching the sun rise at water...

From Port Meadow, Perch-side, you can see the church tower of the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies. I see this tower from the other side...

Not quite a moonlight swim, just a little too early for that. The birthday swim of Chris Dalton at a small beach a little downstream of...