Splashing into 2015 in Strangford, Ireland

2015 with a splash in Strangford

Sharon Charity

The man beside me on the slipway is jumping from foot to foot in his blue board shorts, silver hair and goose-pimpled suntan. ‘At last, a real woman,’ he says as I look down at the green, soupy water of Strangford Lough. I’m wondering if the New Year’s Day harbour dash is a plunge too far in my faded purple one-piece and old hiking trainers. All around us people in wetsuits, swimsuits and dalmatian onesies are shrieking and slapping themselves. About a foot behind us the car ferry clanks its last passengers on board.

‘Three, two, one’ says the woman in a wetsuit and tutu, and suddenly people are splashing into the water, including board-short man who is front-crawling rapidly across the 80-metre stretch. I lower myself in, knowing it’s going to be colder than anything I can imagine but poleaxed by the icy needles and the harsh grasp that forces my lungs shut. I stand up for a few seconds and look back, wondering whether paramedics are needed. But I see my two kids, standing on the beach and waving and force myself forwards into the water.

Exactly six seconds later, fire spreads over my skin and suddenly the deathly cold is replaced by a feeling of incredible aliveness and happiness. Saskia and Danny are leaping around waving and cheering and it’s a big role-reversal as for once in my life I’m the one in the race not the one holding the towel. I plod on in a steady breast-stroke (Salomon hiking trainers hold a lot of sea-water) until after only two or three minutes I’m out, impervious to cold, skin hard and smooth and wide, wide awake.

Strangford is a picturesque village in County Down, on the shore of Strangford Lough. Its New Year’s Day harbour dip is an annual event, with mulled wine, music and hot food to follow in The Cuan, the seaside village’s impeccable inn. Before plunging into the lough I had  a plate of the crispest, freshest scampi, fished in nearby Ardglass.

The inn and the town are no strangers to scenes of drama, indulgence and excess. Just up the road is Castleward, which became Ned Stark’s Winterfell in Game of Thrones. Sean Bean and the entire Baratheon family, complete with the unbearable Joffrey, stayed at The Cuan while they were filming Series 1.

We rented a house, No. 42, for three nights via holidaylettings.com. Just a two-minute walk from the centre of the village, it meant we could welcome the New Year in the pub, singing Auld Lang Syne in a huge, happy circle and joining the singer at the microphone for a family chorus of ‘Oliver’s Army’.

For the whole family, this was the perfect plunge into 2015. The day was crowned beside a roaring fire in a local pub, the Hole in the Wall, where Danny roared like a lion as we watched the mighty Tottenham Hotspur beat Chelsea in a 5-3 rout.

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