‘Let’s buy a paddling pool for the grandchildren this summer,’ we decide. And this is how it begins. Here, on this thinly populated edge of the west Wales coast, we are fortunate to have a large garden which wraps itself around the house so that even a large paddling pool doesn’t make much of an impact on the lawn. We set it up and rather than wait for the grandchildren, who do arrive, and a summer that lasts one week, we try the pool out just to see how it feels. The water’s unheated so my first few attempts are torture as I ease in millimetre by millimetre whilst Tom - who takes the short sharp plunge approach - shouts, ‘In! In! In!’. I quickly realise that the shock of the cold is almost instantly followed by pure bliss; there’s the silkiness of the water, the novelty of the frog’s eye view of the garden and the sheer silliness of lying in a giant paddling pool which makes us both laugh. I’m not known for my love of the cold - I have Raynaud’s, for a start - so Tom is ...
Christine Stovell, author and freelance writer, on living and writing in West Wales