The Water and the Wild

Some great images in Nancy Farmer's swimming-themed 'Facing the Storm' 2021 calendar ( available here ) Ours came with some fabulous synchronised swimming snowflakes wrapping paper too!  

'That summer I was seventeen and perfectly happy. At that time "everybody else" was my father and his mistress, Elsa... he had rented a large white villa on the Mediterranean, for which we had been longing since the spring. It was remote and beautiful, standing on a headland jutting over the sea, hidden from the road by pine woods. A goat path led down to a small, sunny cove where the sea lapped against rust-colored rocks... From dawn onward I was in the water. It was cool and transparent, and I plunged wildly about in my efforts to wash away the shadows and dust of Paris. I lay stretched out on the sand, took up a handful and let it run through my fingers in soft, yellow streams. I told myself that it ran out like time. It was an idle thought, and it was pleasant to have idle thoughts, for it was summer' (Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse, 1954). The 1958 film version of Sagan's story includes many seaside scenes filmed on the Côte d'Azur/French Riviera, inc