'Plash", I was supposed to have said as an infant on seeing the sea. It was my version of Xenophon's soldiers' cry of θαλλαττα, θαλλαττα. It became a ritual utterance on family holidays when we saw the sea for the first time through the windscreen of my father's Austin A60.
This is a roundabout way of saying that for the second day of Juneathon I swam in the sea. The temperature, according to the Channel Coastal Observatory buoy in Seaford bay, was 14.7C. I last swam in the sea at the end of October last year.
It seems banal to say that at first it felt cold, then warm; the sea always does. I swam for around ten minutes. It is impossible to record distance in the sea; I used to count strokes, but I found I forget. On the beach a woman sat upright, utterly still, looking at the horizon, for all the time it took me to undress, swim, dry myself and dress again.
