Extracts from my written summary of a swimming trip to Hampstead Heath Ponds. Swimming in the Searingly cold waters on a misty, November morning was genuinely one of the most bizarre and painful mornings of my life.
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The first minute was the most difficult. My heart immediately seemed to reject the task at hand and began kicking furiously against my chest. It was like a petulant teenager pissed off with its parent for dragging them to such a hellish Sunday morning activity. After a bit of a pep-talk, I reopened my open eyes and started to look around. 

Male bodies and heads slipped up and down beneath the black slick of water as they swam impressively around the pond. The short decking that lead into the water (at the end of which waited the diving board) was centrally placed within our swimming zone, and so became a draw around which the swimmers gravitated. It was almost a safety net. 

As I looked beyond the immediate vicinity I suddenly became aware of the trees that lined the swimming area. They had become as faintly fragile as shadows due to their encasement within the mist. They were cloaking the pond and clawed at the dense edges of the sky with old, angular fingers. It was ominous to see them looking so much like ghosts observing us in the raw water. I was also struck by how quickly the landscape around us became consumed by the fog, our eye-sight befalling nothing but a flag of thin milk. It was as though we were existing as part of someone’s imagination, detail slowly evaporating away the further from the focus of the imagineer it lay (where I so clumsily paddled).