Isn't it odd that we all live on a cool, rainy island and yet many of us do not appear to like water too much?

We look miserable when it rains and if it pours, as it has in the last month, we seem unable to deal with it.

Our bodies are largely made out of water and we must drink the stuff in order to live.

But rain is often regarded as a terrible nuisance rather than essential to life and most people would no more think of swimming in a river or the English Channel then they would go to the moon.

Yet there's a minority of people, and I count myself among them, who regard walking in the rain and cold water swimming as pleasures to be enjoyed rather than pain to be endured.

On Monday morning I happened to be out in the great storm as dawn was breaking and was caught in one of the most astonishing squalls I have ever experienced. It was truly exciting and exhilarating.

Our centrally heated lifestyles and penchants for foreign holidays have made us accustomed to warm air and water.

There is something luxurious about swimming in a warm sea, and I was lucky enough to be doing just that last week off the north coast of Majorca, but the colder climes of this country are also welcome.

About this time of year, the sea temperature falls below 60F and this is an important reading for anyone seriously interested in swimming.

It is bracing to enter the water but not to linger in it for a long time. My old swimming companion, Peter Sired, always said the water has a champagne quality at this time of year and he was right.

Brighton, and many other resorts, were founded on the notion that sea bathing (and even drinking the water) is healthy - and it probably was in an age when hygiene was not considered important.

Some people, particularly round-the-year swimmers such as David Sawyers from Brighton, claim cold-water bathing is particularly beneficial.

In a wonderful book called Waterlog (Vintage £7.99), author Roger Deakin makes similar statements after plunging into lidos, lakes, seas, springs and rivers right across Britain for most of the year. He is almost lyrical about the benefits of swimming.

During his magnificently eccentric mission, Deakin met many other people who love being in water and don't really mind if it's cold.

You can see them in the summer at the Pells pool in Lewes or at Saltdean Lido.

Later on, when these pools have shut, you can often see indomitable elderly women in bathing caps striding purposefully into the sea off Hove.

Even more impressive are those who go in on most days, whatever the weather.

On a fine Christmas Day, more than a thousand people will turn up on Brighton seafront near the Palace Pier to watch perhaps 50 hardly souls take the plunge, and I am often among them.

These days I confine myself to a short, sharp dip which gives the maximum benefit but there are some who strike out boldly into the sea as if it were the summer and look none the worse for it.

Many are old age pensioners and some of the hardiest stalwarts are more than 80 years old.

There's a difference between saying you take a daily dip and actually doing it throughout a year.

My colleague, Terry Sinnott, managed it in 1973 without ever being beaten by high winds or rough seas.

I was much more timid when completing the same feat in 1977, often having to return at low tide.

I went in during rain, with snow on the beach, when I had a cold and even at the end of the year when I was feverish.

But my proudest moment came when I was unexpectedly sent on a course to Tring in Hertfordshire, which is almost as far from the sea as you can get in England.

Worried at missing a day or two, I asked Terry if a dip in any outside water would count. He said it would.

And so it was that at seven one cool morning I clambered down a steep slope and immersed myself in the murky, fetid, slimy water of the Grand Union Canal.

More than any other dip, that confirmed that I was a true British water babe. Roger Deakin would have been proud of me.