It seems you don’t need a pool to learn how to swim. You can learn at home, as long as you have an ordinary piano stool. Here is some useful advice from 1937.
Open water swimming
Cold water swimming can seem like madness but this morning, thirty seconds into a swim in the lake at Shepperton, (16 degrees, no wetsuit), I was overwhelmed with happiness. 
Dogs and water
Many dogs seem to have a natural affinity with water, and I believe that all dogs can swim, even if some prefer not to. When I was a child our dog used to love to swim in the Thames. We would throw sticks into the river for her to fetch but if we accidentally threw them too far, where the current was too strong, she always knew when to give up and turn round. She knew the limits of how far out she could swim and still get back to the bank. She never got it wrong, and never seemed to be in any kind of danger no matter how fast the river was flowing. At the time I took this for granted and never gave it a second thought but now it seems quite remarkable.
The photo here is not of my dog but of a dear friend’s dog Pintga happily swimming in a river in France where she lives.
Virginia Woolf on the beach at Studland, Dorset.
Virginia Woolf and Clive Bell in their swimsuits.
“I hired a gentlemans or ladies – it was bisexual – bathing dress, and swam far out … a drifting sea anemone”
We could become a nation of non-swimmers
Diving seal, Farne Islands, photo by Farne Island Divers
Britain could become a nation of non-swimmers if action is not taken to dramatically improve school access to facilities and lessons.
The University of East Anglia have published research showing that fifty one per cent of children aged seven to eleven in the UK cannot swim twenty five metres. This is despite the fact that it is a requirement of the national curriculum.
Twenty five metres is not very far to be able to swim. In Sweden for example children are expected to be able to swim 200 metres of which at least fifty metres should be on the back.
The problem is most acute in rural areas where small schools face problems of time and cost of transporting children to pools.
These non-swimming children will grow up to be non-swimming adults who in turn are unlikely to take their own children swimming and so we could indeed become a nation of non-swimmers.
JP and Me
Me and BBC Radio 4’s JP Devlin about to hit the water. A total and somewhat fearful non-swimmer just a few months ago JP can now swim a length of the pool doing breaststroke and is working on front crawl and backstroke.
He has been a delight to teach and is very brave and determined. He is also always prepared to try out my sometimes slightly odd ideas including jumping in, sitting dives, mushroom floats and spinning round in the water.
‘The sound of a wild snail eating’ by Elisabeth Tova Bailey
This is not in any way a book about swimming but it is sort of about mindfulness, and it is a beautiful book. The author was diagnosed with a severe illness that kept her almost immobile for more than a year. During this time she was given a plant and attached to the plant was a snail. The book describes how her relationship with the snail develops. She watches it intently every day as her main and often only companion and becomes fascinated by its life and habits.
I read this lovely book in one sitting and will never look at snails in the same way again. I finished it feeling that snails have both contributed far more and taken far less from the world than human beings. I also learned the wonderful term, miraculous spiral. This describes the type of spiral of which a snail’s shell is an example.
Another term for it is logarithmic spiral and one of its unique mathematical properties is that the size of the spiral increases but its shape is unaltered with each successive curve. This property is called self-similarity and is also found in sunflower heads and Romanesco Broccoli.
The actual sound of a wild snail eating
The book is an easy read and I would recommend it to anyone.
Hidden depths – the natural world
One of the lovely things about swimming outside is that you are submerged in the natural world. It doesn’t even have to be in a lake or river. O
nce when I went to Parliament Hill Lido I found myself at eye level with a pair of ducks swimming along beside me. I think in our increasingly technological and connected age time spent alone, away from the phones and machines, is important.
When I learned to scuba dive the instructor said to us,
‘The thing most people are afraid of is the marine life, the fish, sharks and jelly fish but in fact these are the least dangerous aspect of diving’.
It is the same for swimming outdoors. When I tell people I swim in the wild lakes of Sweden they often say things like ‘What about the fish?.’
I believe this says more about our fears of hidden depths and monsters lurking waiting to get us than any real danger. At least I think this is true. Some of the pike you can catch in those Swedish lakes are quite enormous and they do have lots of very sharp teeth but I don’t think a pike has ever bitten a person. I have never heard of that anyway. Have you?
Learning through play
I was a little bit exasperated yesterday when the mother of one of the children I teach said to me
‘When are you going to teach him the strokes?’
I sort of interpreted this as
‘When is he going to be able to swim all four strokes in a flawless fashion?’
This boy can swim a whole length of the pool on his back and on his front, can float on his back and his front for at least twenty seconds without moving at all, can jump into the pool, do a sitting dive, dive down to pick things off the bottom of the pool, tread water, but perhaps his strokes are not perfect, yet.
This is also a child who after a good start, refused to go into the water at all for a whole year. Instead he just came to watch his brother’s lesson. I knew that something must have happened to make him frightened and eventually he told me that he had gone under the water and felt he couldn’t breathe. This was not in my class. It happened when he was with another teacher. Eventually after watching my class for a few months he asked if he could join in.
When they are frightened of the water the children often say things like, ‘I might sink to the bottom’ or ‘I might drown’ or ‘I won’t be able to breathe’. I am trying to help them develop the skills they need to overcome these fears and manage themselves in the water, without help, and in a way that they feel comfortable with. This is not a matter of just desperately thrashing your way from one end of the pool to the other.
Learning to swim takes a long time, for adults and for children. There are many stages to go through. At first a non swimmer wants to remain upright and has some difficulty with stretching out in the water. Many people, adults as well as children, don’t want to put their faces in the water, but an ability to do this is an absolutely basic requirement for good swimming. Then without experience it is impossible to understand the exact amount of force or pressure it takes to move oneself through the water. Balancing in the water is different from balancing on land, this must be learned too.
In order to learn the strokes properly you need to learn the elements that go into each one. When a child is confident in the water, learning the strokes is easy.
The parents I love best are the ones who allow their children to develop the skills gradually through exploration and play. The irony is that it is the children who are allowed to play who learn the quickest. I see time and time again, when the parents apply pressure, the children have to resist, in order to keep themselves safe and the whole thing takes much, much longer.
The only thing that seems to spoil the experience of learning swim is the pressure to achieve. This can take away all the joy. I want to say to many of my adult pupils, slow down and learn to play in the water, then you will learn to swim.
Waterlife by Rambharos Jha
Rambharos Jha is an artist and writer based in the Mithila region of Bihar, eastern India. He grew up watching women decorate the walls and courtyards of their homes, and through watching and learning began to draw himself. In the last few years he has been working extensively on water bodies, a subject he describes as “one of my most cherished muses”.
He has used the techniques he learned to create ‘Waterlife’, a series of illustrations and writings exploring marine life. The book is screen-printed by local artisans in Chennai using traditional Indian dyes. It is published by independent Indian publishers, Tara Books, and explores marine life.
mindful swimming 
