Winter Swimmers

Falmouth is hellish when an easterly blows – you go out of the house and it feels as if someone has thrown a bucket of iced water in your face. It trickles down your neck, gets up your nose, in your eyes and up your sleeves, whips all the heat from your body. And because our flat faces east, all the heat is sucked out of our living room windows making the flat freezing.

But this morning, after over a week of gusting easterlies, the wind has dropped and we all heaved a sigh of relief and headed for the beach this morning where the tide was out and the sky and sea melded together in a haze.

Six swimmers were in the water. The winter swimmers are stoic, mostly over sixty or seventy, and swim every morning, regardless of the weather. This morning I spoke to Dominic, a poet who shared the moments of TV Fame back in December and asked him why he did it.

“It gets me going in the morning,” he said, pulling his jumper on over salt sticky flesh. “I can feel the salt on me for the rest of the day. And I seem to have avoided any colds or flu.”

His eyes are dark and bright and his skin was glowing, so he must be doing something right. I remarked on how many people there were this morning and he grinned.

“It’s a sign of global warming,” he said. “You used to measure the swallows in your garden. Now it’s winter swimmers.”

So now you know - want to keep fit? Get swimming. Personally, I'll wait until it warms up a bit.