Exclusive excerpt: The Year I Lay My Head In Water

My new book is published today and I wanted to exclusively share the introduction with you as a thanks for subscribing. If you love Scandinavia, and swimming, and nature, it might just be for you.

Jan 15, 2026

I was sat on a bench by Svanemøllen Beach in Copenhagen, scanning passing faces to see if any of them might be a mermaid. Maybe you can spot one if you know what to look out for, I thought. I imagined long hair and a far-away look in pale sea-blue eyes, but perhaps that was just the stuff of stories. A well-coiffed white-haired lady dressed in beige trousers and a light purple jumper threw a ball for her dog on the beach in front of me as I waited. She gave him a snack from a little bag when he came back. Further down the beach, a group of people in dark green waders collected something from the water, perhaps seaweed, in black buckets. A handful of people cycled past along the paved coast path. It was spring but the cyclists were still wrapped in puffa jackets and wreathed in thick scarves. The chilly wind had not yet got the memo that winter was over. I tapped my feet on the floor, trying to get some life back into them as I waited. There was no sign of the lady I had arranged to meet.

My phone pinged. A message from a friend, also a journalist, asking if she could interview me for a story she was writing about mid-life crises. Was I having a mid-life crisis? I wondered. Do people think I’m having a mid-life crisis? I didn’t think I was. I felt like I was just dumping all the things I didn’t want to do and doing all the things I did. Maybe the mid-life component was that I was old enough to know what these things were, and I was also old enough not to care so much about what other people thought. But then again, what did I know? I was sat by a beach on an overcast grey morning, clouds heavy with rain above me, waiting for a mermaid. I didn’t have anything better to do – and I really mean that, in every sense of the phrase. I didn’t have a job, I didn’t have anywhere I was supposed to be, and I didn’t have anywhere else I wanted to be, either. Even on a cold day, a meeting with a mermaid had a ring of something magnificent to it.

Further down the beach, a pair of Jack Russells were chasing sticks thrown by their owners into the sea, and a woman with long dark hair was stood balancing something orange-brown and unwieldy on her shoulders beside the snack stand. Something about her hair, whipping in the wind, and the strange shape of the object held my attention. While everyone else was moving purposefully around her, she was stood there, trying not to drop it, but as if she had nowhere else she needed to be either. She was a still point in an otherwise moving scene, and her eyes were fixed on the sea. Still thinking about my possible mid-life crisis, it took me a minute to realise that that big thing was a tail. And that she was the mermaid I had been waiting for.

I started a swimming journey in Scandinavia at the end of 2019 when I felt burnt out and fed up with life and all of its shackles. I felt strongly, in my bones, that there was a better way to live. If there was anywhere in the world where I could find out how to live better, this felt like it should be the place. I felt strongly, though I couldn’t articulate where the idea came from, that I had to find a way to connect with nature more deeply to find something I’d lost along the way. I was looking for a compass to show me where to go, and a spark to set me alive again. At my lowest ebb, I was looking for signs everywhere to point me to a direction that would take me to somewhere better, or just somewhere else. And there was water all around, everywhere I looked.

From where I live in Copenhagen, I see boats sail past my window and the sea shimmer in the daylight that lasts all day long in the summer and passes in a precious flash in the winter. Salt water is the first thing I see in the morning and the last thing I see, as I pull down my blinds, in the evening. It is my view from my desk, my kitchen and my bedroom. I didn’t have to go far to find something natural to immerse myself in. I saw neighbours take early morning walks in their dressing gowns down to the deck, shrug off the robes and climb down the ladder to swim, and vigorous and naked twentysomethings take running jumps from the quayside into the harbour while I walked the kids to school on the school run. It was all around me, this sign telling me what to do and where to go

It was a small thing, to start with, dipping a toe into the water just outside my door. But this water flowed into the strait between Denmark and Sweden, to the Baltic Sea that led to Norway, Finland and the Arctic, and to the North Sea that led home to the UK. It was a small thing, but it was part of something much bigger and led, quite naturally, somewhere else.

I started by slipping into the harbour one November morning and it escalated quite dramatically. In a matter of months, I had swum in the Arctic and by the following September I was swimming in the whale-rich reaches of the Greenland Sea, as icebergs floated past in the distance. I still feel a little baffled thinking about it.

I want to share my swimmer’s journey of a year immersed in the cold waters that surround Scandinavia, of the lessons I’ve learned from swimming with these sea-loving people, Karin the mermaid included, and the perspective it has given me on life. It’s a story about what makes you come alive and how doing the things you love can change you in all the best ways. It’s about finding a compass that reorientates you to the things that make life worth living. Henry David Thoreau spent a year living in a cottage on Walden Pond to celebrate and honour the value of nature and life itself; I spent my year in salt water.

It all started a few months before I met the mermaid, at the start of winter.