It took me a few days to remember why I don’t like this time of year. It’s not the grey weather, or the terror of stepping onto the scale and assessing the damage weeks of holiday eating has wrought. It’s not the fact that the stores are already full of Valentines candy, a grim reminder that I’m still single and the only way I’m getting chocolates is if I buy them myself. No, what’s irking me this dark and dreary January day is other people’s resolutions.

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When I was a kid my parents enrolled me in swimming classes, a decision I’ve always been grateful to them for considering we live on an island and the only way off to get to the rest of Canada is to cross a rather significant stretch of ice cold Pacific Ocean. I can always spot the ones who can’t swim when I travel by ferry, they tend to stay to the middle of the craft and count the life rafts as if had suddenly found themselves on the Titanic and surrounded by icebergs.

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Swimming is not a glamorous activity unless you are Michael Phelps, we all know this. The average person does not radiate beauty and style while clad in a wet bathing suit, skin flushed from being submerged in a whirlpool soup of unknown chemistry. We go swimming for fitness, to relax in a steam room and work out the aches and pains of the week. We do not hope for glamour, but we do hope for something vaguely resembling quiet.

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