onionbagblog

Cold Water Whimsicality

“For the unheated lido swimmer (like me), the temperature dropping matters. It means that the water starts nipping at your fingers and toes. That putting your face in is a slap rather than refreshing; your fillings start hurting and you need a blast of hairdryer up your shirt afterwards.”

@jennylandreth on the JOYS of cold water swimming.

Fifteen degrees still remains the tipping point for me. The lovely lido looks as though it is about to take something of a southward dive.

I’ve been pondering a winter swimming membership to take me all the way through to the spring.

But, y’know…

A swim for me has to be functional. There is no such thing as a bad swim, but I want to start my morning with a sense of the physicality having been challenged (steady). I want my lungs to have benefitted from having put the lengths in.

I don’t want to splash around for half a length in the icy waters of Lake Brockwell, with the only alteration to my physicality being the boys in the barracks down below.

But there is a definite romanticism of outdoor winter swimming, and one that @jennylandreth captures with some grace.

Give it a month of being back indoors at Brixton Rec and I’ll soon be longing for the lovely lido once again.

Meanwhile, over in the South Eastern Transpontine territory:

Swimming with Dolphins

“I was slightly sceptical about whether the self-proclaimed Deptford Dolphins were actually going to manage to swim out from Watergate stairs to the nearby crane derrick in the Thames. But two of them made it on 22 September, and there’s a film to prove it.”

Diving into the tawny waters of the Thames down the river at Deptford is an outdoor swimming experience that I am happy to put on hold. It makes a doggy paddle at Brixton Rec appear like an apparition of Atlantis.

via @Transpontine.

Vincent Woz Ere

ACE research on Van Gough’s London, via @CabMirror.