LXVSWIM

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...

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...

South London Swimming Club are framed as the opposition by the Serpentine Swimming Club, at least when it comes to the annual races...

La Banchina isn’t Italian, it is firmly Copenhagen in a cockle-shell. It is a café in a run-down shed on the canal front in a brown field...

Approaching this place of calm and swimming from the very centre of Helsinki seemed straightforward, until Pauline and I encountered...