It’s been a rough few weeks to put it politely and I think it’s important to also talk about those times as well as the fabulous times spent swimming. We live these lives on social media, everyone putting their best side forward or, alternatively, spilling their darkest moments out across the screen for all to see. Most of us sit somewhere in the middle quite honestly. Being deliriously happy or sobbingly unhappy is unsustainable long term, we mainly swing between the two and then settle for something midway.

Covid Kevin came and bashed me round the head once more good and proper, reducing me to a shuffle once more and then, because he is the gift that keeps on giving, I have a frozen shoulder into the bargain. Frozen shoulder doesn’t really cut it as a description, the pain is the closest thing to a contraction in child birth that I have met to date. Great. There goes my plan to get a coach and to front crawl it down the River Thames like some Henley torpedo. But, you know, that is not really what this is about. This Girl Can is precisely that. Finding a way to do something when it feels like This Girl Really Can’t. So, accompanied by my son and trusty Tom dog, I dragged them to the River Cam. It was pouring with rain, it was freezing cold and in I went and instantly everything fell away. All the pain went as the water held me, it’s miraculous. As I swam, a rainbow came out because that’s what happens isn’t it. There’s a rainbow at the end of every storm (that’s some song from years ago but can’t remember who or when or why) and the pot of gold at the end of my rainbow is my dear son and my dear dog. Proper lucky, because whether This Girl Can Or This Girl Can’t, none of us can do this on our own.

I did say previously that one of the reasons for entering This Girl Can was because the swim falls on my Dad’s birthday and he was a massive inspiration for me. In the deepest, darkest hour when I was just thinking that, not only can I not do the Henley swim but there’s any amount of things that I can’t do, I picked up a book that my Dad wrote many years ago. Nothing amazing, but just his musings on memories as a gift to his children and grandchildren. I haven’t looked at it in years but it caught my eye and I opened it at a page where Dad is recalling a memory of growing up in London and the challenges and ridiculous escapades that he and his best friend used to get up to. On this particular page he is writing about a particular challenge and I had to laugh. They had challenged each other to swim a mile down the Thames. Well, what with that and rainbows, I’d better keep going hadn’t I! So, I won’t be front crawling it down the Thames, it will be slow but I will do it and, in the meantime, I will just continue to fling myself in the River Cam at every opportunity. The water is warming up now. Am I allowed to say that I miss the cold water? Never ever, in a million years, did I ever think that I would be saying that!