COLD SHOWER HELL

A Healthy Addiction to Cold Water

How I learned to love the cold

I shower outside.

I have a hose hanging from a horse chestnut tree in my garden. In the morning, I stand under the icy water for as long as I can. Sometimes it’s two minutes, sometimes ten. Sometimes longer if I’m feeling heroic.

We have no mains water where I live. The water comes from a well, so it’s always cold — very cold — even in summer.

Cold showering these days is as popular as homemade granola. But I’ve been doing it for years.

At my boarding school on the English/Welsh border, we were given cold baths by our psychotic housemaster, Murray Smyth. A runt of a man who preferred nothing more than doling out punishments for minor transgressions that should have warranted — at worst — a firm telling-off.

Instead we were made to lay naked fully submerged in a freezing cold bath until we were told to get out. Or, as sometimes happened, the fire alarm was purposefully set off, meaning we had to dash outside wrapped only in a towel.

As a result of this humiliation, I’ve developed a strong resistance to the cold.

At university, my colleagues used to laugh at me when I came in for lectures in shorts in mid-December. I argued that ‘urban heat’ increased the air temperature in a city by about two degrees. Only for my baffled friends to point out to me that it was five below zero.

Standing under an icy shower isn’t everyone’s idea of fun. We’re used to warm houses, showers and baths. So the thought of stripping off and standing under cold water is hardly delightful. I get it!

But it does make a good hangover cure.

In my twenties, when I woke up half-drunk and faced the unsavoury prospect of having to go to work, I’d often take a ten-minute cold shower.

It worked. Downgraded my hangover from monumental to manageable, meaning I could at least get out of the door.

Then I jumped in the sea!

When I lived in Cornwall, my friend and I used to swim in the sea in winter. We’d dive into the breath-sapping water — dressed only in our Speedos — and swim until our feet, hands, legs, and arms were as stiff as French baguettes.

We would then drag ourselves out on our stomachs like seals and drink mulled wine at the beach café to bring us back to life. It did, and we felt brilliant; so good in fact that we often went in again to see how much we could take. I even wrote a short story about it called Survival in Cold Seas, which made its way into a local surf magazine.

You learn a lot of stuff at school (and university), most of which is useless, but some of it (even the tough shit) sometimes turns out to be useful in ways you never realized at the time.

For me, it’s being oblivious to the cold. For Murray Smyth, it was making young boys’ lives a misery. Luckily, the guy's dead, so I don’t have to worry about him anymore.

But every time I stand under that cold shower, I think of cold baths and my time at school. Funny what a garden hose strung up in a tree can do to you.

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