Jemima Roberts

Excerpt from: Why I Swim in Wintry Seas

Overview

Swimming is in my blood. Water coursing my veins just as vitally, as the cells inked red. My Mum, now 70, swims every single day of the year – come rain, shine, sleet or ice. No wetsuit – just a swimming costume.

Back in the 80s, long before ‘wild swimming’ or ‘chill swimming’ became Instagram hashtags, sofa topics on morning telly, or subjects of scientific research into ways to ward off dementia – we just swam. Plain and simple.

As kids, we grew up in the rambles of a smallholding, on an old sprawling forestry estate in Mid Wales. Swimming in the river down the lane, was part of the lexicon of our upbringing. The gentle, gurgling stream a stone’s throw from our back door, wound its way down the hill to the wider, more grown-up, River Ystwyth.

Our most frequented spot was to trickle down to the ‘Dam’ for its craggy clamber, plunging pool and great gushing waterfall – at the bottom of our lane. On those summer days when the air hummed and buzzed with heat and insects, we ambled further, following a crows’ flight route across fields to the ‘Concrete Bridge’ (so-called for the concrete monstrosity of a bridge, somehow given the go-ahead by the Forestry Commission to bridge the Ystwyth and join the dusty tracks around the estate).

Authors

Jemima Roberts
Jemima Roberts is a writer, artist, poet and cartoonist born and brought up in Mid Wales. After university, she spent a number of years living in different UK cities, globetrotting and bobbing across oceans on boats. But like a fish returning to source, she now lives with her 9yr old son, a stone’s throw from where she grew up.She is an alumnus of the Faber Academy (2010) and was the recipient of a Literature Wales Writers Bursary in 2018. She has performed her poems in various far-flung outposts around the world – on land and at sea but has never chased publishing, certainly not for her creative work. The alchemy, for Jemima, has always nestled somewhere in that nexus between writing and performing.Through the From Now On project, Jemima received mentoring support and critical feedback from Hanan Issa, Co-founder of Where I’m Coming From – though not on this particular piece.
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