LXVSWIM

Woman for All Seasons Helen Edwards has insinuated herself on my psyche almost by stealth. I honestly can’t remember when I met her...

I first met Craig at a Dodo swim in Oxford – that is December Oxford Dip Outdoors. Or Dip Outdoors December Oxford. Or December Outdoors...

Nick, at the Serpentine Swimming Club, wanted to introduce me to Pauline Barker last year. I couldn’t make it to London that day, and...

The running head for ‘swimmingpod’ is ‘a podcast series for people who like to swim (outdoors)’ - a deliberate cheese-take on the...

So in the end, the 65 swims at 65 years of age started with breakfast and finished with lunch, with burrata in both cases. This...

Heisenberg was OK with uncertainty, and Schrodinger had a cat. That is how I remember high-school physics - it is a good job my physics...

“Are we nearly there yet?” – so spoke the look on Pauline’s face as we were getting closer, but not quite there, in rural Somerset, with...

When I took part in Swim the Thames, Cookham featured twice – the kilometer or so from Bourne End to Cookham, then a kilometer or so...

‘I am the walrus… I am the walrus…’ kept circling in my mind on the way to Clevedon Marine Lake, across the other side of Bristol, on the...

That’s life. C’est la vie. So das ist das leben. It amounts to the same thing, which Scottish poet Robert Burns summarised as “the best...

“As long as I gaze on Waterloo Sunset, I am in paradise” – this Kinks song from my early adolescence, was running through my head. David...

There is a little London glamour attached to the modest, beautifully proportioned and very lovely lido at Chipping Norton. It was...

This is the closest I will get to swimming in Paris this year –standing next to Seurat’s painting ‘The Bathers as Asnieres’. There are...

It felt like entering Narnia, the magical world created by C.S. Lewis. I was in Cambridge but brought Oxfordshire with me, such is the...

Remember when? This question came to mind over and over, on the way to, during, and after the swim in the River Evenlode at Charlbury....

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...