Covid is turning this indoor type into a Swedish-style lover of the great outdoors – Susan Morrison

For most of my life, Scotland seemed an indoor nation. My childhood memories of various family members, particularly the female ones, are firmly inside.

Susan has taken to swimming in the North Sea like a Swedish person to a sauna and she's not alone (Picture: Keith Woodland)

My old aunty Susie famously sported Fireside Tartan on her legs on a regular basis, caused by sitting unbelievably close to her gas fire whilst watching Songs of Praise, followed by Poldark, the 70s version. Old Susie fair fancied Robin Ellis. She would take her rollers out to watch him and woe betide you if you phoned whilst it was on.

My Granny was never content until the flames were roaring up the chimney and the living room had hit the peak temperature to smelt steel.

Heat drew Scots like bees to honey. My dad would heroically protect his family from overheating by blocking the fire with his bahookie.

School days were less about algebra and geography and more about avoiding teachers at playtime to hide in the cloakroom and find a radiator to hug. Going out in the playground voluntarily was seen as vaguely suspect and clearly signalled said pupil about to make a break for freedom out the back gate. Actually, if it was Peter Miller, he was.

Even the Brownies and Girl Guides, who had entire badges dedicated to outdoorsy things like birdspotting, orienteering and lifesaving, were far more comfortable in the realm of Homemaker, Baker and Ornament Duster. My troupe met in the church hall around a campfire. It was hardly the romance of an outdoor blaze. It was a bundle of sticks tied together and a red light bulb shoved in the middle. Brown Owl did not like outside.

The outdoors was not great, it was suspicious. It was very well for Tom Weir to go stomping about the Highlands, mysteriously free from midgie attack, or the Alexander Brothers to give it laldy in front of a wobbly set of hills and glens, we preferred the indoors.

Not for us the loopy foreign practice of dining outside. Here, the only people who drank tea outdoors worked on building sites and al fresco eating meant Dairylea cheese sarnies at the side of a motorway.

Covid has made Scotland an outdoor nation. We’ve not just re-discovered our parks, we’ve put them to work. You can hardly move for outdoor fitness classes with burly great blokes bellowing at people who paid to be treated like they were in military prison. The walkways around the city are busier than the M8. The beach is chock-a-block with volleyballers, joggers and swimmers.

We sit on benches nursing lattes and green teas wrapped in blankets like we’re Swedish people.

Even I have succumbed to the lure of the long walk and, astonishingly, the sea swim. I’m not the only one to have started frollicking about in the waves again.

There’s quite the community now of wild women dashing into the briny, wearing wetsuits and swimming caps and funky gloves to bob about on the ocean wave.

So many of us are taking to this swimming lark I’m sure satellite shots will reveal Scotland to be surrounded by cheery women swimming in chatty clumps, like pods of chatty Orcas.

If this lockdown keeps on going, I’m thinking of investing in a bobble hat and going full Tom Weir.

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