Rosie smiles when her nephew asks her if she’s still swimming in the sea in October. It is, in fact, when she starts enjoying it again. July and August are all very well, but her spot behind the harbour wall fills up with holidaymakers, annexing the rock where she likes to change, having picnics and jumping into the sea with their children, as if they were swimming for fun. It’s not Cold Water Swimming if the sea feels warm, even to tourists who aren’t swimming mindfully. A few of these incomers stick it out for September but October is what separates the men from the boys. Or the women from the girls, rather. For nine months of the year, Porthemmet Beach is as empty of men as Rosie’s pottery class.
There is a group of ladies that go every morning throughout the year. They’re not yet an official group – with a Facebook page and a committee – mainly because they have never agreed on a name. Rosie was originally in the faction favouring ‘Mad About the Buoy’ (a slightly out-of-date reference, but Lord knows she’s not a schoolgirl) but Nuala said it was stigmatising. It’s one thing to say that cold water swimming is good for psychological wellbeing, or to add #mentalhealth #coldwatertherapy #wellness to every Instagram post, but you don’t want to give the impression that mental health is actually an issue for anyone.
Even though it’s not official, they still meet at the stroke of seven o’clock – the wildness of wild swimming does not extend to slapdash timekeeping – because it’s vital to have other people there, to urge you on. And as a safety precaution. And, of course, to take photographs for Instagram. Rosie is not one of those people who think if you don’t post it as an Instagram story, it didn’t really happen – but since her nephew set up her account (@wildrosie) she’s made sure to document her journey every day. As an advocate for #wellness, obviously, not because she takes any pleasure in people clicking ♥️ or 🔥 on pictures of her in a swimsuit.
Rosie’s also an advocate for clean water: she’s been radicalised by Surfers Against Sewage. If she hadn’t been radicalised, she wouldn’t be using the word ‘shit’ in her Facebook posts about homeopathic dilutions of sewage in the Atlantic. Despite her very funny post about how swimming in Porthemmet after a rainstorm is like that scene from The Shawshank Redemption, the only pollution she regularly encounters is the flotsam of a dozen HRT patches which have come unstuck in salt water by 7.15 am. But her concern about the environment is understandable: the whole point of wild swimming is getting close to nature, having a pure and spiritual experience, and then wrapping yourself up in a £160 Dryrobe.
The Dryrobe is, of course, essential – the swimming cap, neoprene booties and Stanley cup full of herbal tea are, despite their omnipresence on the beach, technically optional – and Rosie finds she wears it all the time now: to the shops, to lunch, to reiki. She tells herself it’s because it’s so warm and comfortable, but it does have the useful side-effect of letting people who don’t follow her on Instagram – or haven’t spoken to her for longer than five minutes – know about her wellness journey.
Wellness is not just about physical health, of course – although ten minutes of breaststroke through the waves, stately as a galleon, can’t do her physical fitness any harm. But really, she loves swimming because it’s ‘good for her soul. She talks about her Soul more than a seventeenth-century Puritan with Scruples about his place among the Elect. Not that she’s worried about her soul, of course; she nurtures it every morning with Vitamin Sea.
When she goes on holiday now, she chooses her destinations through an online directory of wild swimming locations. She has swum in rivers, quarries, lakes and, in emergencies, lidos – anywhere that the directory’s compilers have vetted (wildness does not extend to swimming in unvetted waters, obviously).
But it’s the harbour at Porthemmet which feeds her soul most of all. Here, she has her friends about her; there’s the café which sells her richly deserved lemon drizzle cake and the 5G coverage that means that her photos can be on Instagram before she’s dried herself off.
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