The conversations in the sauna circled constantly around three unchanging topics: the temperature of the water, the inaccuracy of the lifeguards’ thermometers and the prospects for the weather. If you stayed in there long enough, your opinion would be canvassed on all three. The discussions we had often resembled the dialogue of an absurdist drama, full of repetitions, non sequiturs and strange bathos. One elderly woman vocalised every thought that came into her head, from what she was intending to have for lunch to the brand of ointment she used for her piles; clad in a drooping towel and citing weak hands, she would ask the nearest male to wring out her swimming costume. There seemed no appropriate way to decline.

Still, for someone like me who works in solitude, it’s important and restorative to connect with other people. Something we shared was our baffled curiosity at the motives that drove us to participate in such a painful activity. Our general inability to explain it fitted with my growing disillusionment about stories. It seemed to me that the true source of all our desires was mysterious and inaccessible and never disclosed by our belated explanations. First we do things, then we make up stories to explain why. Of course, being a writer, I could invent plenty of reasons. One was that it was something to do with death. It made me think of the Japanese delicacy fugu, the deadly pufferfish; its real aficionados like to enjoy it with just enough of the highly toxic liver to induce euphoria, but not so much as will kill them. When you saw the blotchy ice-milers mumbling incoherently in the hottest corner, as their core temperature rose slowly back to normal, it seemed that they were drawn to some threshold experience, to peering over the lip of the crater at the spectacle of their own dissolution.

But the experience of swimming in the cold also offered less grim rewards. It was often beautiful: the ice sang with the vibration of the water; the pool in sunshine glowed an extraordinary submarine blue, all the more wondrous when you were in it; a pair of Egyptian geese honked by the changing cubicles, like guardian spirits. One sunny midwinter morning a septuagenarian swimmer towelled off his brick-red body and declared to me: ‘If paradise is one tenth as good as this, I’ll settle for it.’

In the water, when the pain eased, I would turn over ideas for stories in my head, wondering at my presumption in  telling untruths for a living. I seemed to have lost the gusto for inventing facts that is at the root of what a writer does – but in the bracing grip of the water, I couldn’t feel sorry about it. I assumed that either something would turn up or it wouldn’t. And it didn’t really matter which.