In David Cameron’s speech about tourism this morning – at the Serpentine Gallery – he lets slip that he has been swimming in the North Sea during the spring. Without a wetsuit.
Or the “Mediterranean” coastline that Gwyneth Paltrow was washed up on at the end of Shakespeare in Love which was actually Holkham beach in Norfolk where I went swimming one April
As regular seafarers will know, the sea is at its coldest from January through to April before the summer sun starts to warm things up. (October and November are much warmer). So it turns out that our prime minister is quite the macho type.
The anecdote proves the line in the splendid Hanning/Elliot biography saying that Cameron has a “labrador-type” tendency to jump into water.
Incidentally, Michael Gove wrote a column for the Times a few years ago claiming that he would love to try out surfing. I called him 15 months later and he still hadn’t had a go. To be fair though, Gove had just been swimming in the sea… off the coast of Aberdeen.
Jim Pickard
Kiran Stacey