FORMER Holsworthy Community College student, Tanya Shadrick, is due to return to her childhood swimming destination, Bude Sea Pool, as part of her role as writer-in-residence for the UK’s oldest freshwater lido.

Tanya, 42, has won attention via Twitter from lidos, sea pools and wild swimmers across the country, all of whom have been intrigued by her central project, involving Tanya writing a mile of longhand on scrolls of paper that, at 150ft, are the length of the lido.

Titled ‘A Wild Patient: Laps in Longhand’, Tanya’s work has attracted a wide media interest, with appearances on the Radio 4 Today programme and BBC One’s South East Today.

Additionally, she has had an article and a five-page photo feature in the recent arts and fashion magazine Oh Comely, and will be speaking at the first ever National Lido Conference in Portishead in September.

Tanya said: “I tweeted a photo of Bude Sea Pool early on in my project, paying tribute to it as the source of my love of cold-water swimming. The tweet was popular with followers of the pool, so the team got in touch and said they’d love me to visit with my scrolls and write for a whiles as I do up here in Lewes.”

Earlier in the month, Tanya visited Shoalstone Pool in Brixham and the art deco Tinside Lido in Plymouth, before using her four years of experience as a hospice life-story scribe to visit a prominent wild swimmer, who is facing a terminal diagnosis.

Tanya continued: “It was a privilege to be welcomed to other pools in my home country, and then to spend time helping a truly inspirational wild-swimming woman, who shares my farming heritage, to record memories and thoughts of importance at the end of her life.”

Speaking of her forthcoming trip to Bude, Tanya added: “To write beside Bude Sea Pool, reflecting on my happy childhood visits and enjoying the sights and sounds of the latest generation of families to swim there, is the stuff of dreams. Especially as my own two children, Gwil, nine, and Meg, seven, will be taking a dip with my mother, Margaret Parsons, who at the age of 70 began swimming lessons to keep up with us all. I will feel very proud watching them all take to the water together.”

To support Tanya, follow her project on Twitter @LidoWriters, or read her work including previously published stories, non-fiction and illustrations on her author sit, www.tanyashadrick.com.

LEFT: Tanya Shadrick at work.