With apologies, I must smash the glass on the case marked: “X days since the Guardian published an article about wild swimming.” Don’t worry: I am not here to extol the life-giving properties of cold water or of being “at one” with nature. If I can find a sympathetic read on the eye-rolls directed at open-water swimming (much of which, to be honest, feels little short of thinly veiled misogyny, given its popularity with women), it’s that so much of it skews painfully individualistic: singular voyages of discovery clad in neoprene. But for me, the loveliest thing about sea swimming is the sense of community it’s created, rooting me in my distant home town.
I grew up in Cornwall and started swimming in the sea when I was small. (I agree with Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett that when you live somewhere coastal, it’s just called “swimming”, no faddy branding needed.) Back then, I liked to swim alone, paddling out far enough that I could sing pop songs to myself where no one could hear, and staying in so long that my lips went blue and I had to be forcibly extracted and revived in the shower. But three years ago this month, when I returned home to Falmouth for a spell after lockdown finally lifted, my friend Flo invited me to swim as part of a small group of women who met early each morning at Swanpool beach. Our ages ranged from early 30s to late 60s. Flo soon moved to a different town and stopped coming, but I kept going, pleased to have a regular outdoor appointment and fresh faces to see during the endless months of working from home.
The group steadily grew. We adopted curious neighbours and beach strays who asked if they could join as we swam out to the buoy and back, dodging the compass jellyfish. I brought my mum and the mum of my best friend of 23 years into the fold. In the water, we talked about books, family, the government’s woeful handling of the pandemic, menopause, psychedelics, hateful media treatment of trans people, quilting, cooking – although every conversation was inevitably paused when someone stopped to behold the glittering sea below Pendennis Point and rhapsodise, “Just look at it!” We went every day, unless the waves raged or the Surfers Against Sewage app warned us that South West Water had dumped shit in the sea – again.
A WhatsApp group was started, the Swanny Swimmers, which transformed this rag-tag of chatty breaststrokers into a real support network. (Although we’ve never advertised publicly, like the popular nationwide Bluetits chapters, who we often greet in the water.) One night, we arranged to go to a different beach to try to witness the phenomenon of bioluminescence: we didn’t get the full Disney Frozen effect, but found that if we stood furiously whisking the water with our hands, it still glittered like magic and made us laugh like hell – one of my few truly transcendent memories of dull 2020. We developed our own language for the water: “bouncy” is good fun, “lumpy” could be risky, “dumpy” best avoided.
I eventually had to go back to London but the group, let me keep one foot in my home town. Members brought each other shopping while one had Covid or another had a badly broken foot; organised fundraising for Falmouth and Penryn Welcome Refugee Families; shared details of protests against the never-ending stream of sewage and more recently the Bibby Stockholm – the barge on which the government plans to house refugees – being refitted in a local shipyard. My old friends in Cornwall are spread across the county: this group felt like a bespoke bulletin board connecting me to home, and a rare taste of real, place-rooted community that can be hard to forge in a big city.
Whenever I come back home, I still swim with the Swannies, as we call ourselves. Some days there are just two of us; others more than half a dozen. There’s no time of year we don’t dunk, though the wetsuits and swim caps go on as the temperature drops. On Christmas Eve, we meet on the beach and fill the picnic benches with homemade baked goods and probably ill-advised breakfast-time booze (post-swim, of course). There have been raucous joint birthday parties (the group’s current WhatsApp photo is one swimmer trying to dance under another’s legs in a state of some disrepair) and swims from beach to beach in memory of another swimmer’s late friend. Far from the notion that millennial, Gen X and “boomer” feminists are at war, the Swannies are a model of nurturing, intergenerational friendship.
And when you commune in one place on a regular basis, you register the changes in the environment, and in each other. Over the three years we’ve been swimming together, we’ve noticed the sea growing warmer earlier in the season (in June, it was worryingly bath-like) and the accompanying wildlife activity (the “mauve stinger” jellyfish has recently come to town, a beautiful but nasty spiny violet thing). Late last summer, during an especially bad personal time, I went home for just a weekend, during which I experienced my first ocular migraine and accidentally drove backwards into a one-way system I had driven around thousands of times (it was early – fortunately no one was around). It was the Swannies who kindly suggested I might want to stay a few more days and rest, so I did.
I recently spent two months at home while I had nowhere to live, and found the group still in a state of growth, reaching inward and outward. Our newest member, it turns out, is friends with my nana. We swam together as one swimmer fulfilled her pledge to do 35 swims in one month to raise money for Solace Women’s Aid because on average it takes a woman being assaulted 35 times by a partner before she reports it. Another swimmer has a worrying operation scheduled; one surprised her with a beautiful quilt she had made to comfort her during her recuperation. It used to be the sea that brought us together. Today, the bonds between the group feel stronger than the tides or any fad, tying us to the town, and to each other.
Laura Snapes is the Guardian’s deputy music editor
