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WRITING this, I am imbued with that bone-weary yet satisfied feeling that comes after a good swim. A swimming class, actually, at my local lido. Two kilometres of 50-metre lengths as a warm-up, then various front-crawl drills involving one arm then the other, hand paddles and pull buoys.

Yet though sheepish to confess it, these Swim Doctor sessions have become a weekly highlight. The gently competitive camaraderie of a class has been revelatory. We each have strengths and weaknesses, but take the plunge and feel better for it.

Rosemary, the 86- year- old swimmer at the centre of Libby Page’s The Lido, knows all this.

When she meets the novel’s protagonist, Kate, a stressed journalist in her mid-20s, she agrees to be interviewed only if Kate first swims in the unheated Brockwell Lido.

‘There was something about Kate that made Rosemary feel she was in great need of a swim.’ The two women become friends, united through their campaign to save their lido from developers.

In John Cheever’s rightly classic American short story, The Swimmer, Ned Merrill, who ‘ had an inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools’ is out drinking at friends, one hot Sunday, when he resolves to swim home through the ‘quasisubterranean stream’ of his wealthy neighbourhood’s pools.

‘The day was beautiful, and it seemed to him that a long swim might enlarge and celebrate its beauty . . .’ The day and Ned start off jubilant, but the mood darkens as it becomes clear that Ned is actually drowning in problems.

Danny, the teenage protagonist of Australian Christos Tsiolkas’s Barracuda is a swimming prodigy, ‘not only is he in the water but he has become water’. But the pressure to compete destroys Danny, making him phobic about the very thing that once felt freeing.

For me, swimming is a mental and physical workout. I can worry away at a problem, until it atomises. In a pool, I feel untrammelled, weightless. Go on, leap in — the water will be lovely.