When Elsa was 11 years old, her parents enrolled her on a holiday scheme at nearby Laburnum Boat Club in Hackney, provoking feelings of overwhelming anxiety and dread. Elsa suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder and felt intense distress at the thought of leaving the house and subjecting herself to a completely new experience she could not control.
“I had visions of capsizing the kayak, falling into the water and getting a face full of algae,” she says. “But my parents said they had to work, so I agreed to go on condition they wrote to Laburnum explaining how terrified I was of going on the water. When the day arrived, Dom, the lead youth worker, took me out with him in a canoe. I thought he would be all frantic and uptight because of my letter, but he was totally calm and unfazed by my fears.”
