Different strokes for different folks but not the butterfly, thanks - Susan Morrison

Molly Renshaw, of Mansfield, who has now won eight medals at major swimming championships.

My swimming lessons were great fun, but our instructors did try to teach us how to do the butterfly stroke. It’s a lunatic move. You have to make like a dolphin, which is tough if your body shape is more walrus, while smacking your arms over your head like demented praying mantis. It's nothing but splashing. And sinking…..

Not even my late grandfather, a life-long enthusiastic swimmer, was impressed by this new-fangled stroke. He told my mum he’d had a go, but he wouldn’t bother again. He was 89 at the time.

Someone made that silly stroke up, I’m telling you. You can see the origin of the classic swimming styles. The breast stroke was obviously designed for women to simultaneously swim and blether. There is a sporty version, but who needs that when soap operas and family dramas need to be discussed?

The crawl clearly developed because it's actually a natural way to churn through the water, and it looks pretty impressive, especially in films. You can’t imagine Bond doing the breast stroke, can you? No. I rest my case.

When I was about 12, my granddad took me swimming at our local pool. When his back was turned, Andrew Millar dared me to jump from the highest diving dale. No idea how high it was, but I remember hitting water with the force of an Apollo capsule landing in the Pacific, bahookie first, a technique known as ‘bombing’.

This was actually in flagrant contravention of the swimming pool rules, but the life guards didn’t stop us because the prevailing view in those days was that the dales were open, you took your chances.

Untrained kids hurling themselves off the high diving board barely qualified as a breach of the regulations. Far more egregious were the sins of heavy petting or, worse, smoking.

There were posters with all the rules up, which means that somewhere, at sometime, water-borne smokers must have been a general and widespread pest. How did they get their matches lit? And where did they keep their Woodbines?

Bet someone swimming past doing the butterfly soaked their fags.