After what felt like weeks of utter gloom, we've had a few sunny days this week, so I've been trying to make the most of the light by getting outside at lunchtime.



Yesterday I walked round the Parks, where the pond was frozen.



Today I went swimming in wonderfully bracing bright blue water.

Obviously, the forecast for the weekend is mostly cloudy.

Work is still awful. I think it is going to carry on being awful for a long time yet.

I am so tired that at lunchtime I sat down in one of the chairs in the staff kitchen after I'd washed up the packaging from the sushi I treated myself to for lunch and couldn't get up again for twenty minutes, despite knowing that I really needed to stop chatting to C and get back to work.

One of my swimming friends is recovering from an operation and the other has a stinking cold, so I may not get any swimming this weekend. And I've just seen someone on the local swimming Facebook group saying their bag was stolen while they were swimming in the lake where we swim when the rivers are too high and fast (which they are at the moment) today, which does make me worried about going there. (I always have my keys and phone with me in my tow float, and I think I need to start putting my glasses in there as well, but I wouldn't want my clothes to be stolen either!)

The water is starting to cool down now; the Thames is around 13.5 degrees, the Cherwell slightly colder. I've been wearing neoprene gloves and socks for the last couple of weeks, but a swimsuit is still fine, and I'm staying in for 20-25 minutes each time. I'm glad of my dryrobe and wool clothes afterwards, even though the weather is still quite mild, with temperatures in the mid or even high teens.

There hasn't been much rain lately, so the flow is still fairly low. Today I swam round the island for what might be the last time until spring; downstream first, in the main channel, then back upstream round the back, where there was almost no current at all and the water was full of fallen leaves. The late-afternoon sunlight was glorious on the water and the gradually-turning leaves.

My swims are still the high points of my week. I'm also starting to miss my lockdown morning walks (I still get the same amount of walking each day, or maybe even more, but it's generally through streets and the Parks and not out in the country), though not enough to want to work from home again, even occasionally.

In an attempt to force myself to stop working before I'm completely shattered, I have set four alarms on my phone:

Monday to Friday, 17:00: "Start thinking about going home"
Monday to Friday, 17:30: "Go home!"
Monday to Friday, 17:45: "No, really, go home!"
Monday to Friday, 18:00: "GO HOME RIGHT NOW"

(I normally get to work about 8am, so even allowing for taking a full hour for lunch leaving at 5:30 is an eight and a half hour day, or a 42.5-hour week. Baby steps.)

Let's see what time I manage to leave the office tomorrow.

On a happier note, the lake was truly glorious today.

Over the summer I have had quite a few evening swims, taking advantage of the long evenings. Yesterday, though, was the first time we had an evening swim in the dark.



Because of the rain earlier in the day, we went to the lake, where there are more lights around than there would have been at the river. Over to the north, the light pollution from the city centre also make the sky much lighter. We had torches in our tow floats, so they glowed like Halloween pumpkins. Once we were in the water and out of the shadow of the trees we could see the bridge standing out against the paler dark of the sky, and bats swooping over the water. It was amazing and magical and joyous (though I have to admit that not being able to see the patches of water weed was perhaps a disadvantage).

My mother went to the zoo near my parents' home a few weeks ago with my brother and sister-in-law and their children, and was telling me how much she enjoyed it, so we thought we'd give it a try while we're here.



They had some lovely otters, and a possibly-debauched or possibly just tired sloth.



It was a nice zoo - fairly small, but big enough to spend a couple of hours wandering round. And it was really nice to go out and do something fun together, for pretty much the first time in eighteen months.

After the zoo I went for a lovely swim in the Little Ouse near Thetford, which was incredibly clear, cold and surprisingly fast-flowing (though shallow enough that in the bits where making headway against the current was difficult I could just wade instead).

Wild Woman Swimming is a collection of Lynne Roper's journal entries describing her swims near her home on Dartmoor and off the Devon coast. Originally published in blog form (the blog is still available online), after her death from a brain tumour in 2016 her swimming friends gathered the entries together in book form, and the result is a gloriously lyrical piece of nature writing which celebrates water and the joy of being immersed in it in all weathers and at all times of year, as well as the friendships of fellow-swimmers. I read it because I love swimming, but I think that non-swimmers would also enjoy the writing and the pictures Roper's writing paints*.


*The original blog posts have photos, but I think that the photoless prose paints better mental images.

I am tired and struggling to string words together, so instead, have a picture from last night's swim.



I'd go again tonight, but I don't have the energy to go out again, and I'm supposed to have knitting group later, not that I currently want to even touch wool.

It's a year ago today that I met up with longterm friend L and newer friend B to swim in the river. I'd swum in the river with L once before, several years ago, but while I'd enjoyed it, I didn't feel that the pleasure of being outdoors really outweighed the inconvenience of getting to the river when I live on the other side of Oxford, and I didn't go again. After three and a half months of not being able to swim at all last spring, I felt rather differently, and happily agreed to the suggestion that we should swim together every Friday over the summer. And then somehow when autumn came round none of us wanted to stop; swimming together had become much too important to all of our mental health, as the pandemic continued. So we kept going, and actually started swimming several times a week; we bought neoprene gloves and socks, and then jackets and shorts; we swam in woolly hats and brought hot water bottles and flasks of tea to warm us up as we got changed, and we kept swimming as the temperatures dropped to nearly freezing. One weekend, we broke ice to swim; we never managed to swim with snow on the ground because when it did snow none of us was comfortable driving to the lake. Swimming has been a joy and a solace to us all, and so has the friendship it's brought us.

We will be going for an anniversary swim this evening, with fancy doughnuts to celebrate. And, entirely coincidentally, I've also just finished making a swimming-themed shirt.

I've had a long weekend of sewing and swimming adventures. Sewing-wise, as well as the shirt I've made two more pairs of pants as part of my quest to replace all of my shop-bought underwear with me-made, and I also finished the cardigan I've been knitting for the last couple of months.

As for the swimming, on Friday we went to Clifton Hampden (which is pretty much the first time I've been out of Oxford or Kidlington since last September, apart from taking T to Islip for his two jabs) where the river was flowing so fast we ended up walking upstream and then swooshing* back down. On Saturday we swam nearly all the way round the lake, then yesterday we thought we'd take advantage of the current to swoosh from Iffley Lock to Kennington, though as it turned out the current seemed to have dropped off a lot since Friday and it was more of a swim. And then today we went to Kennington and swam the whole length of the meadows, including going around the back of the island, and saw lots of goslings.



Four days is nowhere near long enough to recover from burnout, though, and I've had terrible Sunday-night anxiety all day (though the swimming has helped). I think having time off was definitely the right thing to do, and I'm sure there won't really have been any crises, but I am a bit worried about how much email is likely to have piled up in my absence, when this is a short week and pretty heavy on meetings until Friday...

*swooshing = swimming along a current