Swimming - outdoors more than indoors this year apparently. Swimming pools of my youth. Boosting your immune system.

I saw this headline yesterday: “Lidos live again: UK braces for outdoor swimming pool revival”. 

I remember there being an outdoor pool in Southport where I grew up. It was where they held bathing beauty competitions as well as being a good outdoor pool. But it was closed donkeys’ years ago. Maybe it lost custom as more people took holidays on the Costas. I seem to remember it was filled with filtered water from the sea, hence its being called the Sea Bathing Lake. The water would need to be filtered as otherwise it would have had a lot of beach sand floating around in it. My mother did not like us going there. She thought it might be full of germs! Mind you, she had never learnt to swim and so possible did not fully appreciate the fun of it all. My father, on the other hand, in his retirement used to go and swim in the indoor swimming baths, also possible sea water, and swim for a good hour most days. 

Now it seems places are being encouraged to open up old outdoor swimming pools. Indoor pools are finding it too expensive to keep the pools and changing rooms heated and properly maintained. Som many of them are closing. But money is available to refurbish lidos; the National Lottery Heritage Fund is awarding £99,800 to a project aimed at helping people bring their local pools back to life. And so 2023 is seemingly set to be the “year of the lido”. It’s also getting an impetus from the number of people who now want to swim outdoors and want to do cold water swimming even in the winter months. 

Some of this is the fuss that has been made generally about immersion in cold water on a frequent and regular basis being good for boosting your immune system. Most people who believe in this doctrine make do with a cold shower to finish off their daily routine - some of us chicken out of that during the winter months. My personal preference on cold days is to have a warm towel ready when I step out of the shower and to put my towelling dressing gown on the heated towel rail while I get dry so that I can luxuriate in that once my ablutions are over and before I actually get dressed.

Out walking the other day - it may only have been yesterday in fact - we saw a man dressed in long shorts and a short-sleeved pink T-shirt walking his dog. We both had warm coats, hats and  gloves and scarves and in my case two pairs of socks - one knee length cotton pair and a second pair of “arctic” style wool rich ankle socks - under my hiking boots. We decided that T-shirt man possibly thought this was as good for his immune system as immersion in cold water, or perhaps that he came from Newcastle where, so the stereotype says, they are “well hard” and go out in snow storms without a coat! He could, of course, just have been mad! 

Each to their own, I suppose!

Today began with freezing fog. By late morning, though, the sky was blue and the small boy and I went out into the garden to run about on the untrodden snow, maybe half an inch of it from the other day, to build the world’s smallest snowman, and to throw snowballs at each other, snowballs which I had to make for him. Later, when his mother and older sister turned up they all went out to admire the tiny snowman and to throw more snowballs before it went too dark to see what they were doing. 

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!