You can't move on social media these days for pictures of people enjoying a cold dip, smiling broadly in dry robes with hot drinks, extolling the virtues of cold water swimming on Gylly, Swanpool, Maenporth or Grebe.

Up until a few months ago, I thought it was insane. Sure, I grew up in Cornwall, as a child sitting in hot cars driving to the north coast from the south to Polzeath, frolicking wetsuit less in the waves. (You didn't have a WETSUIT my children cry incredulously as if I lived in a sepia photograph).

Yes, I sometimes endured a New Year's Day swim for charity, very much wetsuited and often agreed to after a few proseccos the night before. And I swam in the sea in August, normally egged on by my 80-year-old mum saying 'it's just so warm and lovely in here! (It wasn't mum.)

But it wasn't part of my thing. You see I love warm stuff. Duvets, log fires, cosy jumpers. And hot showers! Cold water was well, just that. Cold and a bit rubbish. Why would anyone want to get involved with that when you could have a lovely bath?

Then something happened during lockdown, as it has for many of us. Cornwall has the best beaches in the UK, and this winter I have found myself dipping in more and more.

I'm not one of those sunrise swimmers. And I draw the line at a cozzie alone, I always wear a wetsuit, gloves and booties (Some say this is cheating. Not me. Anything that gets you in is great in my book.) But walking into a cool, transparent sea, with only the sky above you, immersed in water sometimes still, sometimes slightly choppy - there really is nothing quite like it.

I have embraced the cold as a revitalising part of life, sharpening the senses like nothing else. And I stick to my mother's rule of only having a coffee from a flask AFTER your swim. Never before.

If you'd told me years ago I'd be swimming in December I'd have thought you had sunstroke. But here I am, mainly at Maenporth, Gylly and Swanpool, swimming sometimes alone, sometimes with friends.

And it is a proper swim, not a mere 'dip', as my husband so casually brushes it off. Although he, who previously hated beaches, has started bodyboarding this lockdown. Now that's a whole other story.

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