…And this is how my swimming calendar begins for next year 🙂
With apologies to the Daughters, the Mothers of Daughters, the Token Male… nah, only kidding, I’m not apologizing to you all, it makes a good story. One apology only, due to Mary (and her fans!) – I think this is one of only two side references to Mary in the whole calendar …there she is, over on the right, flashing her boobs at Wales.
If you don’t want to read the text before you have the calendar in your hands, look away now because I’m posting the story up, below. If you don’t know where to get one – on Etsy: https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/4589565933/ – or just click the shop link if that one doesn’t work.
New Year is a Thing
“Oh! you’re a wild swimmer? My daughter does the New Year’s Day Dip!!!”
Yes, I expect she does, along with everyone else’s daughter, sister, mother, grandmother, local press and Token Male. It’s become A Thing. On new year’s day, this is not our lake. On new year’s day, I was once asked to stop talking too loudly next to the local press who were trying to record ambient sounds and apparently did not wish to include a constant voiceover of a woman in her 50s telling an anecdote about pants. I felt, in all honesty, I was there first and this was the ambient for that location.
But needs must: high tide* was 5am and 5.30pm; the weather threatened cold sleet. A Dawn Raid on the lake seemed to be the best plan, but by 8pm the previous evening the plan had slipped to a Sunrise Raid. Surely it couldn’t be that busy? And so, in what turned out to be a comparative lull between Early-Getter-Uppers making successful Dawn Raids and later Daughters doing the New Year’s Day Dip, we slipped in, just ahead of an outlandishly timed Thursday Park Run.
It was cold. Really, quite cold. Cold enough to swim to the buoy nine and a half metres out from the steps and call it a day. And, because seemingly everyone was doing just that, I swam over to Blue Holm**, climbed out and stood on the blue plastic platform. This is completely pointless and not a thing I usually do: You only have to get back in again in order to get back. I don’t like to dive in, or jump in, the goggles will shift, water will go in, and that will be annoying for the entire… 50 metre swim back. All I can say is the first sunrise of the year made me do it.
Having no other point to this out-of-character behaviour I looked for people to wave to. Absolutely nobody looked my way. Not one. Not a sausage. But then again, absolutely nobody noticed Mary flash her boobs towards Wales either, unless the Welsh did.
And so, following no applause, we dried and dressed and toddled off to the Beach, where Andy serenaded the Bristol Channel with bagpipes. A single, random Bloke from Birmingham, who was dressed as a swimmer but was not one, noticed and joined us. At last, we had drawn a crowd of one.
Bagpipes on the beach are now an established New Year’s Day activity, this being the second year running. Andy has decreed that this is so.
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*Swims can only be swum at high tide, unless you enjoy mud-wrestling in dangerous tidal currents…
**Blue Holm, the platform / island / not-a-pontoon in the lake is also now named, and A Thing, and if you don’t believe me, you can Google it… don’t forget to leave a review if you visit it!
