Old Ireland lives on in a frozen Christmas swim

On Christmas morning the entire village will gather on the beach at the end of the main street. I think the ‘main’ is probably superfluous here. There is really only one street with a series of small roads and paths stacked above it on the hill of Ardmore. If you were to stand at the Storm Wall, just above the beach, you would see a hundred or so hardy folk dressed for a sweltering summer’s day and waiting for the order to charge.

The more obviously hungover, the elderly and sick, and the plain cowardly gather around the table of soup, tea and whiskey organised by the local members of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association. The Christmas swim is held to raise funds for the Royal National Lifeboats, a much-loved institution in a place that has known numerous drowning tragedies among its fishing community.

I remember the first time I took to the waters on Christmas morning. My son Daniel woke me shortly after six with an excited shout: ‘It’s snowing.’ I looked out and saw the white flurries settling on the frozen fields. Knowing I had made the promise to swim, I groaned. But the good cheer of my fellow swimmers carried me through the ordeal. The water itself was bear-able. It was the wind howling across St George’s Channel and along the Waterford coast that turned my extremities blue. My friend John King took one look at me and remarked, ‘What in the name of God are you trying to prove?’

King is a man who believes that taking the dogs for a walk should be the limit of exercise for any sensible man in his forties.

But it was worth every second of Arctic misery for the sense of achievement that followed. In middle-age a man grasps at what- ever evidence of surviving hardiness he can find.