Got bored the two time strands – past and present – and catching up with the past. Got bored with taking photos at Pt Chevalier beach, I have a ridiculous number of them. But that doesn’t mean I won’t carry on catching up, but at a certain point I will run out of photos because I haven’t taken one for ages. And, then there’s no catching up to do because if there’s no photo, there’s no record of the swim. I’ve been going to Pt Chevalier beach nearly every day since about October last year. Except for the times I was at Agnes Waters in Queensland. Yes, you read correctly, that’s Queensland, in Australia!!! I have read that if you use more than three exclamation marks in a row, it shows you are a bit unhinged. Agnes Waters is a beautiful beach. I was there a month ago. Stupidly hot climate. Very warm water. Lovely swims. I have photos, somewhere… here are some. Totally unedited, so the colours and definition are a bit flat.

Swam today at Pt Chevalier beach, midday tide, sunny, lots of people. Didn’t make to the beach until well after high tide. The outgoing tidal current is strong so I decided not to swim to the buoy. Yes, that’s a development. We have been swimming to the buoy. There are three buoys actually, we have swum to two of them.

Sometimes I swim to the closest buoy by myself. That’s 15 minutes swimming each way, 30 minutes total. It might not sound like much but to me it’s epic. When I first tried seriously swimming freestyle again a couple of years ago I could barely manage five strokes without losing breath. Before that I tended to swim backstroke but now I mainly swim freestyle. So, I can swim for 30 minutes without getting tired.

And I’m reading lots these days. Glad I can. Brain function seems to be improving, finally. Read a Tim Winton novel last week. Currently reading Joan Didion’s ‘Year of Magical Thinking’. Plus lots of poetry. Language poets, and modernists. Missing when I was an undergraduate studying English literature. Same old story really – I didn’t realise how lucky I was. Would love to be studying literature now. I have a much greater understanding of the things they write about. Many of the works we read were written by people who are a similar age to what I am now (which is top secret, by the way). When you are twenty-something it is difficult to get a grasp on many of the big issues like death, ageing, the weirdness of time and memory, the importance of appreciating sunsets and even clouds…

I currently have a schoolgirl crush on this poem:

It is verbless. And I love it. Impressionism. Imagism. Modernism.

And I LOVE this one too…

William Carlos Williams. For some reason I missed out on the modernists when I was at uni. I did virtually every other poetry class but had a bad attitude towards them. Thought they were boring. ‘glazed with rain water’ … ‘Petals on a wet, black bough’ … soooo impressionistic, but in a unambiguous, clear way.