Those who do not swim outside in the winter never get to experience one of the small delights of the undertaking, which can fill the mind with a warm glow though the body may be chilled to the core. It is the glow of victory. The minor but absolutely necessary victory of achieving a more-or-less dressed state of being, with fingers that have no feeling, muscles that have no strength, an arrangement of confoundingly over-complex tendons. It is the victory over incomprehensibly elastic fabric, and numb skin sticky with damp and salt.
The victory of actually pulling up your own pants.
To be sure, many winter swimmers do without this garment, but there are other challenges on offer: that of choosing to dress inside the unmanageable tent of a Dryrobe, the tackling of socks and leggings, or that pinnacle of folly or achievement: squirming into a sports bra. You may pick your battles, but pick some of them you must, and the warm glow afterwards comes not only from the flask which I hope you have remembered, but from a small triumph of will over matter.
Enjoy your flask: you have earned it!
This picture is available as a print in my shop: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1608751567/
(If the direct link doesn’t work go to the main shop front and search for the picture by title)
After spending so long almost exclusively doing digital drawings, I was pining for the real substance of things – a visceral ‘thingness’ that gives the line and the colour much more character. So this is the first drawing I have done on real paper for a while and only the second in coloured pencil for years. I hope you like it, because colouored pencils are my new (old) favourite thing. I took some photos as I went along. Apologies for the changes in lighting, there’s not been a lot of decent daylight for photography lately, but still, you might find this sequence interesting:
And finally here are some close-ups so you can see the layering of pencil. I have created a lot of the tone in layered colours of pencil approximately cyan, magenta and yellow colours, so that the tone is built up in a sort of grey-ish, which is in fact, not at all grey in detail.
WaterDrawn 