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and the chest’
    Dr E. Baynard,
Health
, 1764
    I t’s a Monday lunchtime in early August and when I look out of the window of the train from London there are low black clouds most of the way to Swindon. I’m anxious about a few things: mainly if I will be able to cover the whole five miles. I’m a fair-weather swimmer; for me it’s a solitary activity done for pleasure. I’ve always swum outdoors, starting as a toddler at the unheated lido on Hampstead Heath in north London and then as a teenager in the Heath’s bathing ponds. But cold water has become more of a challenge as I’ve grown older and I only venture to the lido or ponds on warm days. While I don’t mind swimming with weeds and fish, I’ve never been competitive and I’ve never swum any set distance.
    In February, shortly after I visited Thames Head and the source, I started my ‘training’, aiming first to swim twice a week at an indoor pool. I knew I’d have to be able to swim for at least an hour at a time for this trip, and it was a couple of weeks before I managed a mile, with quite a bit of stopping and starting and a growing sense of lane rage. Then I decided, for the first time in my life, to wear a wetsuit, optional for SwimTrek but providing protection against the cold. The label on mine said it was inspired by the killerwhale and when I tried it on I immediately felt encased; it was like wearing a thick rubbery inner tube. I tried it out at the Gospel Oak lido; the water was just 15 degrees, which would normally be too chilly for me, but with the wetsuit on I was able to swim straight away. I was oddly bouncy as I started doing front crawl, travelling on the surface of the water as if held up by some invisible force. Then I tried breaststroke. My feet popped up out of the water as if they were made of cork; I couldn’t kick; I had no power in my legs at all. I did two lengths and gave up. As the weeks went by I managed to swim further, then I moved to the Heath’s mixed bathing pond, deciding this would more resemble the experience I would have in the River Thames, but I still didn’t know if I could do five miles.
    As the train reaches Reading I see the river from the window again: it looks very wide, empty and cold. I have other worries apart from the distance, especially swans. I’ve heard many tales of having to escape hissing swans, or what it feels like to be at water level faced with a 6-foot wingspan. I was scared enough of swans to begin with; now I’m just praying I won’t see any.
    For weeks I’ve been telling everyone I meet that I’m going to swim in the Thames, partly because I can’t believe I’m going to but also because I enjoy their reaction, which seems to be a mixture of admiration and disgust. But I soon find that swimming in the Thames seems perfectly normal in the Cotswolds. At the bus stop in Swindon a woman says ‘fair play’ when I tell her about my upcoming swimming holiday.
    I get off the bus at Lechlade and walk down Thames Street to Halfpenny Bridge where David Walliams began his swim from Riverside Park. I pass low stone cottages and the Cotswold Canal Trust, then the road leads up to the small hump of a bridge – Halfpenny Bridge – named after the toll pedestrians were required to pay until 1839 and where there is still a small, square toll house. To the right the view is all but obscured by a huge weeping willow,beyond which I can see swans and moored canal boats. To my left the land looks as if it’s been cut with dressmaker’s scissors, leaving the banks a little frayed around the edges. Andy Nation began his 2005 swim around a mile upstream from here, while the Walsh brothers started just downstream at St John’s Lock. I’m trying to imagine what it would have been like to set off, knowing there are some 147 miles to go, when there’s a roll of thunder and so I rush back to the town