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There’s a joke doing the rounds at the moment. How do you know someone’s an open-water swimmer?
Because they’ll tell you.
I so love this joke. If there were an Olympics for jokes, this joke would be a shoo-in for the gold.
The lockdowns have been responsible for a lot of disrupted routines in the last year and a half as well as, sadly, some new ones.
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People by all accounts have taken to the seas with the zeal of the newly- converted (please see joke).
Open-water swimming is apparently invigorating and life-affirming and utterly transformative (please see joke). These people swim to the buoy and up and down the beach and around the headland (please see joke).
It’s as if random members of the Famous Five have materialised on this island and are determined to relay everything, absolutely everything, about the super adventures they’ve had of late.
Good for them.
The thing is, you see, I’m an advocate of the dip.
Let’s be honest here. For a very long time, us Irish pretty much ignored the waters around us. Moving along on top of them was grand but through them and in them, well, that was a different kettle of fish altogether.
Until, that is, the dip was invented with its five separate components.
1) The reluctant shuffle into the waves, arms folded across the body or, in a gesture of surrender, raised into the air. 2) The squeal when some of said waves splash ever so gently against the body. 3) The immersion into those waves. 4) The shaking and shrieking following that immersion into those waves. 5) Repetition of stages three and four until the body reluctantly agrees to maintain a pulse while in some way submerged.
My Da was a great advocate of the dip.
Like many of my peers, I bear the childhood scars of rain-soaked summer holidays which invariably involved sitting despondently in the car at the end of misty Galway lanes and Donegal boreens with much talk from the front seat of it being warmer, much warmer, once you got down into the sea.
She rarely went in and remained for the most part in the car, armed with enormous towels from American relations
Da would regularly leave work early during the summer months and drive us all to our nearest beach at Bettystown, togs and towels in tow. There was never an overabundance of enthusiasm at play here, as evening temperatures in Navan were pretty much never replicated on the strands of the Irish Sea, 25 miles down the road. And wetsuits back then were the sole domain of an all-knowing French diver who spent his days fearlessly confronting sharks and squids on the flickering TV in the corner.
And so, we’d go work our way through stages one to five at which point Da would lean back and toes poking skywards, give himself up to the ebb and flow of the tide.
My mother was having none of it, herself. She rarely went in and remained for the most part in the car, armed with enormous towels from American relations in which she engulfed us, when we appeared shivering at her window.
Family photos have us peering out from these great folds of material, pale, unsmiling, hair askew.
A couple of years ago, I brought my nine-year-old niece for a dip off a quiet beach in Howth.
It was deep into August and as it turned out, the greyest of grey days.
The sea was grey. The beach was grey. The sky was grey. I forced myself beneath the waves from the off, determined to set a sterling example, and emerged with the usual lies of how it really wasn’t that bad once you got used to it.
Eventually she took the plunge and we splashed around for what seemed like an age but was probably mere minutes.
Back on the strand, she produced a grey towel from her bag and wrapped it around her, fairly clinging on for dear life.
She stood there, forlorn and frozen, against a backdrop drained of all colour. And in that instant, it was as if she had entirely merged into her surroundings.
I couldn’t have been prouder. The baton had been passed.
We’d done the dip. And a proper one at that.
And so to those swimmers all set to make it to Wales and beyond, I salute you. I genuinely do.
But when it comes to encounters with the waters surrounding us, the shorter, the sharper, the colder, the greyer, the better.
And the next time I see you, I’ll tell you all about it.