It's lovely once you're in

A beautiful beach on a lovely sunny summer day - what could be better? This is the North Beach in Tenby on the South Wales coast last July. I have been to Tenby many times and love swimming in the sea there - it's clean and clear and not too cold. There are hermit crabs and fish to look at and the occasional jellyfish to dodge and the waves are just high enough to be interesting.

So I'll stay in the sea for over an hour: late afternoon's the best time. I will swim up and down and jump over the waves until everyone else has come out of the sea and is ready to go back for tea and they are all calling me from the beach.

It was my mother who started it. She was brought up in Barrow-in-Furness which is thought of by many as a slightly grim industrial town with a shipyard. But there are very many lovely beaches round about. No spectacular cliffs, just long expanses of sand and pebbles and dunes with oyster catchers and gulls pecking about. My mother loved them and spent all her childhood and teenage years heading for the beach as often as possible.

So when I was little, we went to visit my mother's relatives in Barrow, and as soon as we decently could made for the beach at top speed.

It was never warm and always windy, and the beach at Walney is covered in pebbles which hurt your feet. But although it was April, and freezing cold, and the sky was grey and the sea was grey there was no question - we were going in.

Out of our clothes and into our swimming costumes and the burning agony of putting our feet in and then the deep chill as the water crept up our bodies, deeper and deeper until the bravest one plunged in. Up went the traditional cry:

"It's lovely once you're in." So in we went, for as long as we could stand it, and then out we came, shivering so hard we could barely speak.

My mother was clearly mad, indoctrinating her children in this way. But, as the Jesuits said, give me a child until she is seven years old - - oh, I loved it. I still love it. Show me any beach, any time of year, I'll be in the sea.

My mother is well over eighty so of course can't be expected to swim in freezing cold seas any more. Not for so long, anyway. Sometimes she comes out after only twenty minutes.