Kenwood Ladies Pond, Monday 7th March 12.00

MG

I'm still on a soaring high from our holiday, and to calm my jangling nerves and fight off the onset of a crippling depression brought about by the return to real life, I make the pilgrimage to Hampstead. It's a perfect day for it – clear blue skies, and London actually looking quite beautiful; it's a very clever city at sudden surprises, reminding you that maybe it isn't all traffic, and Oxford Circus, and filing, and tourists getting in your way and never seeing the sky… look hard enough and you might find this…

I meander across the Heath, for once getting neither lost nor furious as I make my slow way to the ponds. There they are, still, glassy, green, but appetising all the same. There's a lady just getting out, and another arrives as I leave, so there is clearly a steady flow even at what must be the slowest part of the morning. We have some banter, and again, there's that brilliant feeling of shared understanding between winter swimmers; we're mad to everyone else, but to each other, it's the best sort of sanity.

I approach the water and agonise as I slither down the ladder and in; it's 6 degrees –  exactly the same as when I came in January, which seems surprisingly constant. It's cold. But the birds are singing and the sun is warm on my face as I strike out across the water. I'm in too long I think, doing several rounds (I must be careful about this) – I only get out when my hands start to tingle and a strange spasm like a tentacle shoots across my arm. Of course, it may actually be a tentacle….

I change leisurely and a lady arrives and is in and out before I'm even in my third layer tshirt. She is totally breathless as she comes back in, glowing, but gasping, which I remember from my first swim last year (April – when I nearly died and SW and I looked like we had been peeled after two minutes in the water), but haven't experienced for ages. I gaze reminiscently and slightly nostalgically at her struggle for air as her lungs look like they are about to close up. What happy days those were.

Despite easy breathing, I'm cold and dash across the Heath to Kenwood for several cups of recombobulating tea and bowls of stew. Our holiday and all it's various treats may be over, but for a good few weeks more at least, the icy, life giving water is going nowhere. As SW reassuringly says as I later lament the approach of warmer waters (!! That's a joke… sort of…) "I think we can shiver at any temperature if we stay in long enough and dive deep enough".