It’s about time we cleaned up our filthy rivers

Cold water swimming has gone from an eccentric and very niche pursuit to something everyone is doing – and is very keen to tell you about, whether or not you’re interested. There’s been a bit of a backlash against the sport’s popularity recently, with a variety of objections. The first comes from the ‘in my day, we called it swimming’ brigade, who are particularly aerated about the current fashionable term ‘wild swimming’. It’s just swimming, they say, and people who do it aren’t any more special than anyone else. The second is the one that accompanies every new trend: it’s being colonised by annoying middle class types who are turning what is by its very nature a low cost, wild, activity into something you need expensive kit to do (see this piece on the ‘Dryrobe wankers’ of Dublin, for instance). In some places, the backlash – backsplash? – has taken on a darker side: a group of swimmers in the Lakes have found the tyres of their cars slashed by someone who apparently objects to them parking and swimming in Windermere.