Just last month, David Cameron lent prime ministerial approval to this trend when, ahead of a tough day’s negotiations at the G8 summit in Northern Ireland, he let it be known that he had taken a manly 6am dip in Loch Erne.
And then disaster struck. As Britain basked in one of its rare periods of sustained heat, scores of people who would never normally go swimming anywhere suddenly felt compelled to cool off in any spot of water they could find. In most cases, these experiences have been harmless enough – brief splashes in some of the country’s life-guarded outdoor pools and lidos, short dips in the sea in popular resorts such as Brighton.
Some, however, have not: sad cases involving reckless leaps into rivers, ponds, quarries and stretches of the sea by people without any sense of whether it is safe or sensible to do so.
Some have paid the ultimate price. The news earlier this week of the two young girls who met their deaths in the River Wear has been a terrifying reminder of the very real dangers of swimming in open water without proper knowledge of the conditions and the experience of doing so.
The deaths of Tonibeth Purvis and Chloe Fowler – just 15 and 14 respectively – were the latest in a string of fatal incidents at open water spots throughout the country over the past three weeks. To date, there have been some 20 deaths, some, like Purvis and Fowler, have been mere youngsters; others have been older (though not necessarily wiser): a 41-year-old man in a lake at Bawsey Pits in Norfolk; a 21-year-old man at the confluence of the Dee and Ceiriog rivers on the Shropshire-North Wales border; a 40-year-old woman in the sea at Seaton in Cornwall.
These incidents have produced an inevitable backlash and warnings that open water swimming – as well as “tombstoning” (jumping into the water from a height) – is to be avoided at almost all costs.