I went yesterday to a funeral of a woman I admire greatly. She was ninety-five years old when she died - but wow! How she'd lived those ninety-five years! Her contemporaries didn't seem to find the story of her life particularly unusual because, of course, they'd lived similarly full and exciting lives. But the effect on the young adults present was electrifying! It was one which has led me down several different paths. And of course the one I've taken is idiosyncratic: - I've come to feel desperately sorry for them! That was a feeling I'd begun to experience when I first came across the phrase "wild swimming." It was not, as I was imagining it, some 'Ancient Briton' re-enactment; or people covered in mud and feathers and tribal costumes leaping off cliffs into distant pools. It was a word purely coined to refer to the act of propelling oneself through any body of water which is not the sea or a swimming pool. The idea that