In the Swim for a Happy New Year, 2022.

It’s the first swim of 2022 in Bassenthwaite Lake with just some onlookers swanning about on the shore.
They have chosen the calmest bay to haul out on, nearly mirror clear, within a vista that is choppy to say the least. The wind is bluff enough to make the nearby boat shrouds keen like sirens and serrate the lake surface into fine sections with the quickness and efficiency of a Gordon Ramsey attack with a sharp vegetable knife.

Strangely though, despite its strength, there are no white horses raised, only ripples breaking on the shore. Instead, the gusts pummel the water from above in great gasping downdrafts from Sale fell that squeeze the fluid momentarily, and in passing, force it into a multitude of pyramidal peaks striving to find a space in any dimension under the pressure. I can feel it bludgeoning the back of my neck, increasing ear pressure and parting my ponytail into strands that squash and whip-rise at random. I swim against low diamonds of dark and pale water, that being so air-constrained, are not overwhelming, just sharply slicking the taste of cold over my lips once in a while.

On Lake-sized scale, the wind is mapped by the water. The pounce is unseen but its sudden footfalls are marked at the instant of its impact and subsequent skid and slide into crescent-shaped fans of indigo, a thousand toenails shredding the water at their leading edges with the thin hiss of ripping silk. Today too there are deflected darts of air power, separate, slender as stilettos, carving delicate lines straight as dies for a metre or two before disappearing.

The criss-cross lines and crescent curves draw patterns that expand, fade, join and conjoin in infinite complexities and textures, infilled by diamond matrices; wind and water welded in wet explosions . I wade out of the moving maze, dripping cold pearls, shivering and splashing my own New Year pattern and do star jumps for hope all up the shore.