Forget about your Strava and take in the view
If you’re around my age, one of your first on-screen sightings of what we now call ‘wild swimming’ was probably in Merchant Ivory’s sumptuous 1985 adaptation of EM Forster’s A Room with a View. For a schoolboy on the cusp of adolescence in the north east of England, Forster’s depiction of wild abandon in the fields of northern Italy and Edwardian repression in the drawing rooms of Surrey was a heady mix of pent up lust, floppy fringes and linen breeches. But more than Helena Bonham Carter’s petulant pout as Lucy Honeychurch, Julian Sands as George Emerson falling out of a tree shouting “Beauty! Liberty! Joy! Love!” or the swooning beauty of Rupert Graves as Lucy’s brother Freddy, my most memorable moment of the film had to be Freddy, George and family friend Mr Beebe frolicking in an English lake, naked and carefree. To be honest, a naked Rupert Graves did have quite a lot to do with why it was my favourite scene, but the joy and playfulness of swimming outdoors struck a chord in my young wild swimmer’s heart.