Swimmingpod

This podcast is about my practice of swimming to work, the last of which took place in 2022 when I retired. A swim to work for me was 8 kilometers, from Eynsham Lock to Port Meadow, Oxford. My final swim to work was on a Friday, when I had been accompanied by several friends, to make it a memorable one. While previous swims to work had started early in the so that I could get to work on time – my work place has a shower and I keep a change of clothes there – this one started at the civilised time of nine am, and was followed by a royal welcome by Neil Scott onto his boat on Port Meadow. A red carpet, someone to help me change, pastries and fresh coffee. The extract is from the book, Memories like Water, an account of my swimming in 65 places at the age of 65 years 

Jeremy Wellingham and Mike Harris are both open water swimmers, Jeremy in Oxfordshire, Mike in London. Both swim nationally and internationally too. Both write swim-inspired haiku. In this podcast they talk about their swimming experiences, and what it takes to write this Japanese short-form poetry. Water features widely, and thinking poetically shapes their awareness of the environment as they swim.

This podcast is about swims in The Shire - Tolkein’s Oxfordshire. I have no idea if Tolkien was a swimmer, but there is plenty of evidence to suggest that he liked water. In Lord of the Rings, The Elves have close affinity to water; while Ulmo is the Lord of Water. Ulmo is also the enemy of evil creatures, and therefore water is associated with moral force.  The Shire is a place where hobbits live, hobbits being easy-going, liking a quiet life, but who can also handle a big adventure. Most hobbits can’t swim, and most are afraid of rivers. Not me. The three accounts of swimming in The Shire are extracts from my book ‘Memories like Water – Swimming in 65 places at the age of 65’. Swimming the River Thames from Lechlade to Buscot, swimming in a secluded brook by an old ruin at Minster Lovell, and swimming in the River Thames at Day’s Lock.

Emma Gibbard and Carl Tysom are both passionate about open water swimming, and both have been involved in overseeing swimming at the West Oxfordshire Sailing Club, where there is a lake with a one kilometer track, and dedicated members who swim on a regular basis, many of them through winter, alongside a thriving sailing community. I am also involved in overseeing swimming here. In this podcast we talk about swimming in West Oxfordshire, and about the issues associated with running open water swimming at a small club. Carl had already swum his distance when we found him recovering, in dry robe, over a cup of tea. Emma and I were yet to swim.

Five years ago, Stanley Ulijaszek undertook 65 swims in different places at the age of 65 years. The book 'Memories Like Water’ is a personal account of these swims. A lot of things happened in that year. Going to swim in places known, in places new. Lakes, rivers, oceans. Revisiting places and the memories that have gone with them, revisiting the memories of those places and reinventing them. In this podcast, Stanley Ulijaszek talks about this swimming journey, and describes the first of these 65 swims, which takes place at the West Oxfordshire Sailing Club swimming lake.

Helen Edwards is an ecological artist, dancer, and swimmer. I am with her at her solo exhibition at Oxford’s North Wall Arts Centre, entitled Breathing of Life.  She has danced and swum in natural landscapes all her life. Connecting body, breath and imagination, she makes aesthetic connections with environmental images – in paintings juxtaposed with underwater photography, and film. In her work she likes to bridge art and science, culture and community, all with a focus on water and ecology. She takes her approach to the pragmatics of nature restoration and to environmental projects.  In this podcast we talk about all this, as well as her situatedness in the Oxford land and water scape, focusing on her daily water related practices, including swimming.  

Swimming outdoors every day, Stanley Ulijaszek celebrated his 70th birthday recently, obviously with a swim and a song, a picnic and cake. Will his guests still swim at 70? This what they said, in turn: Gemma Ferrier, Jeremy Wellingham, Lizanne Christopher, Blan Walker, Lisa Keeping, Jess Harrold, Steve Banner, Sarah Dilger, Alana Smith, Julie Macken, Kristie Waller, Louisa Maybury, Kath Fotheringham, Darrin Roles, and Alice O’Leary. The music is Noe Noe, and The Zeppelin, from Blue Dot Sessions.  

Sam Millward is a scuba and freediving instructor, fascinated by the mental, physical and experiential benefits that all forms of immersion can give. In this podcast he describes the different world that free diving is a gateway to. He also describes deep diving, with equipment, and the physiology that goes with it - what your body needs to be able to do. Breathing, breath holding and breath work are all hugely important in diving, whether it be free or deep, and Sam discusses the psycho-physiological states that being able to link mind and body in breathing and diving practices. Finally, community - as a medical anthropology student, Sam is deeply attuned to how communities are formed around these practices, and when keeps people coming back.

Level water means equal rights. In the case of Ian Thwaites and the charity Level Water, this is right to water, which swimming is a gateway to. He set up this charity with the mission of giving children with disabilities the opportunity to learn to swim, and by extension, empowers them to take part in a range of water-based activities that swimming opens the gate to. From physical development to social and emotional confidence, swimming is a vehicle to change the lives of children supported by Level Water for the better. Level Water has lots of events, which through swimming, raise funds, build community and build relationships. This powerful synergy raises the tide for everyone - the children, the institutions associated with swimming and disabilities, and the swimmers themselves.  

Ramin Cyrus has swum a channel relay, the Thames Marathon at Henley and other big swims, all great achievements. Powerful achievements, given that he is visually impaired. While for most open water swimmers, sighting is a matter of looking up, to work out where they are and to set their course, Ramin Cyrus sights without sight, with the help of great friends in the water, Paul Daniels and Anthony Wood, he is having the swimming time of his life. In this podcast, recorded at the Lido café in London’s Hyde Park, we discuss his swimming achievements, and what it is like to be a swimmer with visual impairment. We discuss what needs to be in place to undertake such big swims with no sight, how he navigates the water, and how he recruits all his senses to undertake the most sensorial of sports.

Vera Prokopieva and Annie Liddle were undergraduate students at the University of Oxford. They both took up wild swimming together while at Oxford. Annie grew up on a farm in Hampshire while Vera grew up in Bulgaria. Both had a love of swimming before coming to Oxford, and both have taken their love of swimming with them. In this podcast we discuss the value that open water and winter swimming bring to brain work and to everyday student life.  

Paul Atherton is a filmmaker and Londoner. He produced and directed The Ballet of Change, four short films that were projected onto London landmarks, most famously Piccadilly Circus in 2007. His video-diary Our London Lives is in the permanent collection of the Museum of London. He took up outdoor swimming at the Serpentine Swimming Club, London, in the Summer of 2023, barely being able to swim 50 meters. Just a couple of months later, he completed a mile and a meter in the race by that name, at that club. In this podcast, over breakfast at the Serpentine Lido Café, we discuss swimming, building achievements from a modest baseline, and how swimming allows the mental space for creativity.  

Karen Throsby is a swimmer and a sociologist. She is passionate about marathon swimming, and her CV of international distance swims is truly outstanding, taking in the Catalina Channel and Twenty Bridges Swim around Manhatten, as well as the English Channel. In 2008, as she started training for her English Channel solo swim, she took this as a unique opportunity to bring together her combined research and swimming interests. She wrote a very scholarly book called ‘Immersion: Marathon Swimming, Embodiment and Identity’, which takes the lid off of the identity and body-shaping process of becoming a marathon swimmer. In this podcast, we talk about what it takes to make a marathon swimmer, through the lens of her own Channel swimming experience.

Access is an important issue everywhere. People of all creeds and backgrounds swim. Georgie Milner is a life-long swimmer and is very keen to improve the inclusivity of sport settings. She graduated in Human Sciences from the University of Oxford in 2022, where she completed her dissertation on the intersection of swimming and social exclusion, alongside working on the Oxford University Sports Council as Inclusion and Access Officer. As well as water and inclusion for swimming as sport, she is passionate about refugee rights and water safety. In this podcast, recorded in August 2022, we talk about Georgie’s passion for swimming in both the pool and in open water, about inclusion, about her dissertation, and much more.

Francesca Forno, of Trento University, Italy, gives a presentation entitled 'From grassroots to platform: The reconfiguration of alternative food provisioning in the online world'

The gorgeous rivers of England are sick, and I am sick too. Of the politics, of the discharges into the rivers. Of the effluent, both real and that spoken by the politicians currently in charge of this usually green and pleasant land. A land also full of streams and rivers, veins and arteries of blue space, often blue but also often coloured by raw sewage. The personal is political, and that goes for swimming waters every bit as much as human rights. This podcast is in response to a front page headline in the Guardian newspaper - ‘Tories turning rivers into open sewers’ - Sir Kier Starmer, leader of the opposition Labour Party, bringing poop pollution further into UK national politics.

In May 2022, the Serpentine Swimming Club was inducted into the International Marathon Swimmers Hall of Fame (IMSHOF), in Naples, Italy. One Saturday morning following this proud moment, many of  the club’s marathon swimmers came together to be photographed by Anthony Wood, a fellow Serpentine Club Swimmer who’s been photographing life at the club for the past few years, as documented in his Instagram feed @coldwatermornings. This podcast catches the exuberance of the morning’s celebration with many of the clubs’ marathon swimmers as they assembled by the Serpentine Lake in Hyde Park, London, with interviews with some of the many, including multiple solo English Channel swimmer Nick Adams, John Coningham-Rolls, Neil Drinkwater, Robert Fischer, Tom Elliott, Gerald Power-athome, Club President Rob Ouldcott, Judith Charman, Mark Johanssen, James Lythe, James Norton, and the legendary Rosemary George. Marathon swimming defined here as 10 kilometers or more, takes, time, persistence, determination and of course - support. James Norton mentions three that supported him; Volker Koch, Alan Mitchell and Kevin Blick, all marathon swimmers themselves giving up their time to play a modest role in another marathon swimmer’s challenge. ‘Teamwork makes the dream work’ – trite but true.

So many cold water swimmers are non-conformists, but who would have thought of it as a political act? Grace Wright-Arora carried out social research on cold water swimming for her undergraduate dissertation at the University of Bristol. She interviewed outdoor swimmers in London and near Bristol, and found that for many, swimming was a way of resisting norms and structures that confine them in everyday life. Like size-ism, that people have to fit bodily norms dictated to them by health authorities or the fashion industry (strange bedfellows, it seems to me). And linked to that, pool-ism - that you need to have a certain type of body to swim in a pool or run the risk of being judged by others. Or the physical structure of the pool itself, dictating how you can swim –up, then down, then up again, and again and again. Or the political-economic structures that deem it OK to dump raw sewage into rivers. In this podcast, she describes her own cold water swimming history, what took her to study the often personal politics of cold water swimming, and discusses with Stanley Ulijaszek her findings.

It is winter, and there are many winter swimming briefings out there – this is a good thing, people are aware of winter swimming safety. This podcast is a raw recording of the briefing given and embellished by Stanley Ulijaszek and prepared by Jeremy Wellingham, at the annual winter swimming event at Oxford's Port Meadow, the Dodo Swim. It takes the swimmer or dipper through a chronological sequence, from preparation on the day, to immersion and swimming, to ending and getting changed. 

Swimming in moonlight is one of life’s un-buyable treasures. There are twelve full moon opportunities a year, and although the clouds or the rain can sometime put a spoiler on things, you can come away having experienced at the very least a change in routine, and more often than not, a sense of wonder of the world. All it takes is a full moon and some open water to swim in, and of course some friends to share it with. In this podcast, Stanley Ulijaszek describes three very memorable moon-swims: his first ever, in the Thames at Dorchester, Oxfordshire; a recent strange dip at Port Meadow in Oxford; and at the Lido in Venice (which is really a beach). Each is different but all three share a strange enchantment.