The days start getting longer on Tuesday.
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More light while in lockdown, yay! Haha… stoked really for longer days but I still feel like January and February are the shittest, coldest months to get through though but knowing spring is coming always helps.
Yeah, January sucks and this is going to be a worse one than usual, but thank fuck for daylight. Seems like there are days now when it doesn’t actually even get light.
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Remember that one guy having a meltdown about December?
Fuck December!
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Nah, there is enough going on in December to distracted you at least, unlike January and February… pure dead weight of the calendar year, haha.
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The week before january payday. Woof.
December’s fine, I can deal with it. Well, apart from the perpetual darkness thing and I’m choosing to ignore the fact that the ground’s been wet for three days despite it not having rained at all, and so skating’s on hold for a bit.
Putting that to one side, it’s alright. I’ve only worn long trousers twice this winter, other than that it’s shorts and no socks still. One incidence of frost on the car, and still swimming in the sea daily in just shorts and fins albeit with a slight nod to winter with a neoprene headband to stop the ice cream headaches, (sewage leaks permitting, of course).
I’ve been doing that for 25ish years and for the past two or three, the Jan-Mar period is getting more and more of an unpleasant battle no matter how I’ve managed to delude myself otherwise. January and February are a shit to keep swimming through - double figure water temperatures are a doddle. It’s when you’re looking at 7-8 degrees and the air temperature is just above freezing that it sucks - although you probably don’t need me to point this out, common sense dictates that that is bloody obvious .
This year though, I feel that I’ve put in the years/done my time/whatever and I have nothing to prove, (especially not to those fucking smug dry robe ‘wild swimming’ newbie brians I keep seeing everywhere. They’re always talking about how wonderful it all is and how great it is for your mindfulness * and Wim Hof this and that etc,etc…then proceeding to faff about floating for a couple of minutes, still talking about god knows what, no actual swimming going on. I know they’re enjoying themselves and people should be free to do what they like, but it grates, grrrr. Come and talk to me about it in twenty years and we’ll see how fun you think it is then! There are some stretches of beach where you can barely move for packs of chattering dryrobers in waterproof beanies and Uggs, carting about luminous floats and wet packs all seemingly under the misapprehension that they’ve invented some new thing because they’ve bought a bunch of ‘kit’ and have organised groups- fuck me, they’re annoying) Ooops, slight digression there, I guess that’s been bothering me more than I thought 
Point is, this is the stoked thread and I have finally decided that enough’s enough and I’ve just ordered a wetsuit that I can swim in. Stoked.
- that’s not to say that it isn’t - it is. I’m just a bit sick of hearing it from people who been doing it for five minutes.
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Dryrober needs adding to the dictionary.
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They seem to unable to take the damn things off. I’ve a feeling that the swarms of polyester Jedis I’ve been seeing everywhere are probably made up of the same people who, a while back, had yoga mats attached to them at all times. You know, picking the kids up from school, in the supermarket, wherever - yoga mat. Now it’s the ‘oh look at me I’m a wild swimmer dryrobe. Dryrobers. 
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Dry robes themselves, as functional items, are pretty good when your semi-hyperthermic on the shoreline. It’s the people in them, with their maniacal grin selfies that get on my wick.
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I guess so. We all managed perfectly well without out them. But yeah, they serve a purpose. I just don’t fancy joining the gang.
Having a conversation with your average dryrober is a bit like being approached by a kid who’s riding a Route One complete who then tries to tell you how skating is. I’m glad for you that you found skateboarding and that it makes you happy, that’s cool, I’m stoked for you. I’m not going to tell you, because you’ll find out at some point, that you’re doing it wrong and there’s absolutely nothing you can tell me about skateboarding that I don’t already know. (Insert grumpy old man meme here).
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It’s the adding wild to normal activities that irks me.
Wild swimming aka swimming, wild camping aka camping, wonder what the next wild will be. Maybe wild bumming.
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Basically, it’s annoying as it’s so middle-class.
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I can’t agree more with all of the above.
‘wild’ camping & swimming gets me.
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Shall we go to the skatepark, or go wild-skating?
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If we’re caught short when we are out with our daughter, we call it going for a wild wee.
Wild camping has been a term used for as long as I can remember to just mean not on a campsite.
Always called that ‘camping’.
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Yeah, but I mean by the National Trust or other public bodies, it’s just what it’s always been called, it’s not some new thing made up last year.
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