The original plan was to hire a river-boat for a week and travel up the Thames from Oxford, but this was our baby's first real outing and the other family had just returned from a holiday so in the end we made it a day trip. There had been a lot of talk of Weil's disease which you can catch from dirty river water but it was such an unusually hot day that on the return journey I dived in and was soon followed by the children and the other father. They all swam close to the boat, playing and shouting and struggling to climb back on board. I find swimming boring and focus too much on imagined horrors below, so to keep busy I swam away from the boat toward the far bank. The boat and everyone on it looked small from there. I circled for a while, waited for a boat to pass and then swam back. It was a small boat but it was surprisingly hard to climb back in without a ladder. All the towels were wet so I stayed in the sun and joined the children sitting in the bows trailing our feet in the water
The original plan was to hire a river-boat for a week and travel up the Thames from Oxford, but this was our baby's first real outing and the other family had just returned from a holiday so in the end we made it a day trip. There had been a lot of talk of Weil's disease which you can catch from dirty river water but it was such an unusually hot day that on the return journey I dived in and was soon followed by the children and the other father. They all swam close to the boat, playing and shouting and struggling to climb back on board. I find swimming boring and focus too much on imagined horrors below, so to keep busy I swam away from the boat toward the far bank. The boat and everyone on it looked small from there. I circled for a while, waited for a boat to pass and then swam back. It was a small boat but it was surprisingly hard to climb back in without a ladder. All the towels were wet so I stayed in the sun and joined the children sitting in the bows trailing our feet in the water
