Laura Reineke has been a mermaid for seven years now. Or more precisely, she’s a member of Henley Mermaids, the name she and a few friends from her open-water swimming club gave to the WhatsApp group they created for arranging river dips. Seven years of navigating various unmentionable waterborne substances later, the mermaids aren’t just swimmers now but fully fledged clean-water activists, campaigning to highlight pollution in Oxfordshire’s waterways alongside the likes of TV presenter Steve Backshall (who lives nearby with his Olympic rower wife Helen Glover) and lobbying local politicians.
Reineke, who works for the conservation charity Wild Fish, still swims daily with the help of an app tracking Thames Water’s regular discharges into the river: but lately, she says even the supposedly clean stretches seem murkier. “You can’t see the bottom any more, the plant life is covered in sewage – it’s grotty. It’s really, really sad.” Though as she points out, it’s much worse for the fish.
