Good morning or afternoon,

I am in New York! Irrelevant to this, enjoy reading about women who free dive. It sounds like one of the top 10 most scary things that you can do.

This started when I read a poem about the women of Jeju who dive for abalone. You can read the poem first if you like, but might also enjoy getting the context first if it is something you don’t know about already (as it was for me). Some horrible metaphors here:

The women work long hours in icy water as deep as 40 feet. Old haenyeo ballads speak of “diving with a coffin on the head” or “toiling in the netherworld so our family can live in this one.”

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/south-koreas-women-sea-have-free-dived-abalone-17th-century-180954103/?no-ist

Here is Jean Kim’s poem:

http://hyphenmagazine.com/blog/archive/2015/09/september-lit-haenya-abalone-huntress-dancing-jean-kim

A free diver who did this for fun, Natalia Molchanova, died recently. She started doing this at 40 and got really, terrifyingly (have I conveyed with enough emphasis my horror/fascination with this practise/sport) good at it.

In this extraordinary sport, free diving, she had 41 world records. She could hold her breath, when floating motionless with her head under water in a pool, for nine minutes and two seconds. Swimming horizontally underwater with a fin, she could cover 237 metres. Diving with the fin alone (as she preferred), rather than aided by a metal weight, she could reach 101 metres. […] After she turned 50 she liked to break diving records on her birthday, to show other middle-aged women what they could do.

http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21660947-natalia-molchanova-worlds-greatest-free-diver-was-presumed-drowned-august-5th-aged

See you soon London and it’s been a ton of fun New York,

Alex.