4322 days ago
Christmas day at the Highgate Ponds – where allegedly lunatics and pike swim and crayfish behave like sharks – is the top of the yearly swimming market; overpopulated with unfamiliar crowds pulled in by the ‘greasepaint’ momentum of the occasion but woefully unfamiliar with the joys of swimming throughout the seasons.
In consequence, it is my habit along with the other waterfowl to duck out of the Christmas day plunge; going short of the mulled wine, the hoisting of the Union flag on the ruins of the old high diving board of the long vanished, once celebrated, Highgate Diving Club; the traditional bugle call across its steel grey water – and of course, the hyperventilating joy of Christmas Day hyper cold water as men in rubber swimming hats and snow white bodies, dive in to race across its bitterly chilling surface – to the distant cheers of a well wrapped, North London spectacle seeking onlookers. Even the ducks, coots and the grebes take off until this Christmas day festive peak is passed, and the place sinks quietly back into the consoling values of solitude and the wintery beauty of Boxing Day, when I returned.
