Group message incoming…
A: “By any chance, does anyone have golden syrup I could borrow just now?”
L: “I do, if you can live with own brand, I’ll walk up and meet you halfway.”
Next time our party of seven meets, the golden bottle is returned to its owner, with much laughter, beside a dreich loch just past dawn. Dawn itself is too early to swim just now - as I write this it’s spring, yet feels like summer, but when we started in January (piggy backing on W’s new year resolution), we met at the garage at 07.55 and crunched through the frost on the beach for our first terrifying test drive. We undressed in a sand dune changing room as the grenadine sun emerged behind silver buckthorn bushes, and I tasted a fading orange berry that was rancid, but still zesty enough to feed our companion blackbirds and thrushes. Behind a thin veil of bruised cloud, a full moon lingered over the ocean like a trick of the light. L shared a new word she’d heard on the radio, apricity: warmth of the winter sun, the wrong word for this slate sun that coaxed morning from the brittle sky.
Not that the cold put a single one of us off. That - the first time, was before we got addicted to endorphins produced by our amazing bodies in response to early morning exercise, nature, physical shock, and a great deal of light-hearted chat and giggles. Now we look forward to it weekly, sometimes more often, and each time, the event is recorded with a joyous selfie. Due to the wide age range of the women we are, even the simple art of taking a selfie is a source of hilarity. Digital natives don’t understand how complicated it is for the arthritic. It is a source of pleasure and pride for me that, guests included, we span the decades in age from 20s to 80s – yet we are all the same age at heart.
There was no apricity until late February. That’s when R joined the group, adding to the warmth of the post-swim huddle - mittens and flasks, soaking it up and laughing about wing-suit base jumpers and pink, strap-on, hot water bottle bum bags. This is a real thing, modelled by A, who can somehow even make the most absurd gear look fabulous. One week, determined not to miss out, T took an important teams call in the car en route, impressing us with her knowledge and business prowess and making us laugh with the incongruity, and even more as we tried to keep quiet.
In March: J joined the group, serene and all-in; L lost her beloved family cat, and I, my 99 year old Nana-in-law; we shared life ups-and-downs, along with more gear, vicarious holidays, pictures of weekend adventures, silly GIFs and all round encouragement; and we met every Wednesday morning for an invigorating swim and a laugh before anyone else woke up. ‘Why isn’t everyone doing this?’ I think, but reassuringly, lots of people are.
Towards the end of April, having so far adjusted our meet to coincide with sunrise and the tide, our leader, L, announced a 6:15 am start. The rest of us looked at one another nervously - how far were we going to allow this mad woman to lure us? The sunrise is a marvel, but… Fortunately for us all, she, too, respects her body’s need to sleep, because I think we would have willingly turned into a coven of witches by the summer solstice, wild from insomnia and the raw energy of the waves.
And so, we forfeited the sunrise for sanity and stuck to the routine. The funny thing is, for the first time in my life, I can say I’m almost looking forward to the days drawing in and enduring deepest winter with our non-hibernating companions (the birds). This means that we can resume the elemental connection between day breaking and the earth rotating our friendship towards the sun.