Brace yourself for a freezing, festive dip

COLD FEAT Tom Ough joins the hardy bunch for whom an icy swim is an essential part of the Christmas calendar FESTIVE SWIMMING: ADVICE FOR BEGINNERS

There are certain moments in one’s life that mark you forever, and here’s one I just had. It was 11.09am on Dec 12, I was knee-deep and shivering in the cold water of Whitley Bay, and a foaming breaker was about to hit me.

At this point, already whimpering with North Sea cold, you go through a sort of hyperspeed Kübler-ross progression, racing through denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance in the second or so that elapses between seeing the wave and it dousing you. The splash qualifies as a near-death experience. I probably qualify for some kind of veteran’s payout. You would think that nobody would do this willingly, but they do, and they also, for some reason, like to do this on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day. I find this puzzling, because running into an icy sea sounds about as Christmassy as kerb-stomping Tiny Tim. But there are tens of thousands of lunatics out there who feel this is an important part of their festive calendar.

I went for an early festive dip – a phrase topped in the Christmas oxymorons charts only by “delicious Brussels sprouts” – with the Panama Swimming Club of Whitley Bay, a town on the North Tyneside coast. The club’s members swim together several times a week, and only call off a session if there is so much lightning zapping the surface of the sea that they risk being electrocuted. Otherwise, whether it’s raining, snowing, hailing or just plain old freezing, they swim. They meet in the clubhouse, get changed, troop down the beach and then, step by step, some quicker than others, they trot or run or inch into the sea. To outrank this lot in cold-weather dip experience, you’d need to have survived the Titanic.

I asked if I could come for one of their three weekly swims, and, with the caveat that they’re not organising a festive dip and can’t be responsible for those who take one, they invited me to join them one Tuesday morning. We met at 10.30am at their clubhouse, which is in the process of being done up, with the help of North Tyneside Council, and now bears, on each of its four sides, the smiling images of swimming costume-clad club members. Note “swimming costume” – as I’d been warned via email, they don’t wear wetsuits, no matter the weather.

My point of contact had been Heather Murphy, a 60-something writer and freelance language trainer. She introduced me to the rest of the friendly group, composed largely of retirees. Sensing my apprehension, Murphy was encouraging. “It’s white and foamy today, but I’m not putting you off!” she said. A club-mate delivered a dourer assessment: “You realise how dangerous it is?”

The swimmers arrived one by one, chatting and drinking tea and coffee in a common room sort of area that looks over Whitley Bay beach. Some come every week, others four times a week. There’s a long waiting list to join the club, because its members are so forthright about sea swimming’s benefits. Regular swimmers find that their fitness improves and they make friends, perhaps because there are few experiences more bonding than evading death together. There are more immediate benefits too, accessible even to those of you who splash drunkenly into the sea on Christmas Day and don’t swim again until the following year. The extreme bodily stress that is being suddenly subjected to cold water can improve the victim’s circulation, give their immune system a workout, and, once you’re back on dry land, bring an endorphin rush comparable to that you get after a tough run. “It’s a legal high,” says Murphy.

Someone rings the coastguard to let them know how many of us are going in, someone else rings a little bell, and that, at 11am, is the signal to get changed. We file into male and female changing rooms. A bloke spots my lack of neoprene footwear, the club’s only concession to the world of wetsuits, and is kind enough to lend me a pair of thick, rubbery swimming socks, which will allow me to focus on avoiding death by drowning rather than death by stepping on something sharp and getting the wound infected.

A few minutes later and we’re picking our way down the beach in twos and threes, marked out by our colourful caps and unseasonal state of undress. Dog-walkers raise their eyebrows. I’m in a pair of swimming trunks and it’s about 45F (7C). I can feel the wind on my bare torso. Goose pimples spread over my pale skin. The tide is low, so there’s a long walk down the sand’s shallow slope, but the froth and crash of the North Sea gets closer and closer until we’re right in front of it.

The wind picks up. A couple of our number lead the way into the water, and I guess that it’ll be easier if I go straight in, so I keep walking, feeling the cold water around my ankles, knees, thighs, and – splash! – groin. I involuntarily whimper. I am in so much discomfort that I may as well be dead, so, still crying out in agony, I go deep enough to be able to dunk myself neck-deep. Around me, my colourfulcapped comrades are doing the same, some beginning to swim.

When you’re in cold water, it can feel after a while that your body is used to it, but in reality you are on borrowed time. Your body’s optimal temperature is about 99F (37C), and maintaining that becomes very difficult when you are submerged in a substance that rapidly conducts your body heat away from you. Coached to breathe evenly and slowly, I felt like I was managing the discomfort fairly well, and managed to join the group in singing Happy Birthday to a member who’d turned 64 that day, but after a few minutes I was told it was time for me to get out, and as Murphy and I walked back up the beach, I could feel my thighs tingling with a strange heat.

It was an early symptom of hypothermia, and I understood why the group had been so vigilant about my safety. Looking down, I saw that the cold had made my skin red, as if sunburnt or slapped all over. “You’ve got the Whitley Bay tan!” said Murphy. So if you’re running into the sea this Christmas, don’t stay in long. But you knew that already.

‘They only call off a session if there is so much lightning zapping the surface of the sea that they risk being electrocuted’

Sunday 16 December 2018

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How to play Basics: Griddlers are solved using number clues to locate solids (filled-in squares) and dots (empty squares) to reveal a picture.

Each column and row has a series of numbers next to it. These refer to the number of adjacent squares that should be filled as solids. If more than one number appears, that line will contain more than one block of solids.

The solid blocks must appear in the order that the numbers are printed. For example, a row that contains the numbers 11.5 would contain, somewhere, a block of 11 adjacent filled-in squares (solids), then a gap of one or more empty squares (with dots in) and then a block of five adjacent filled-in squares.

Sunday 16 December 2018

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