RCF Model Paper 2: AQA Marking Guide

Both writers think the public expects too much, but they position themselves very differently in relation to that expectation. The physician of Source A places himself above it. He announces that he does "not hold with the extravagant claims of certain of my colleagues", and the phrasing is that of a man correcting his profession from within it, secure enough to be unfashionable. His authority is built by structure as much as by content: balanced clauses - "I have seen persons bathe daily ... and I have seen others who never went near the water" - present his experience as evidence weighed rather than opinion offered. The writer of Source B places herself inside the crowd she is criticising. "I include myself in that. It is not a criticism." The two short sentences concede her own foolishness before anyone can point it out, and by disarming the obvious objection she earns the right to make her case. Where Source A persuades by standing apart, Source B persuades by admitting she is one of them, and for a modern reader the second is the more difficult position to argue against.

They differ, too, in what they think the disappointment is caused by. For Source A the fault lies with the promising: the machines "are advertised with promises I would blush to make", and the visitors "were promised a miracle and given, instead, a habit". The antithesis in that last clause does the whole argument in eleven words, and the choice of "blush" locates the shame precisely where he wants it, with the advertisers rather than the bathers. Source B agrees about the promising but is angrier about the vocabulary than the advertisements: she isolates "the words transform and heal" and leaves them standing on their own, so the reader inspects them as a doctor might inspect a symptom. The physician blames sellers; the columnist blames a language that has got loose, which is a more modern and more uncomfortable complaint because it implicates everybody who uses it.

Finally, and most tellingly, they disagree about what should follow from all this. Source A ends in advice, and its imperatives arrive in a rhythm designed to be remembered: "bathe early ... bathe briefly ... and above all, bathe regularly". Having demolished the miracle he immediately offers a discipline, because a physician's business is to prescribe. Source B ends by refusing to prescribe anything. She reports that her life "is arranged exactly as it was", allows one small exception, and then withdraws even that with "I would just rather nobody sold it to me". The last sentence is the shortest in the piece and it asks for nothing at all. Source A therefore conveys an attitude of corrective authority and Source B one of tired honesty - and although the physician is the more useful of the two, it is the columnist who is harder to disbelieve, precisely because she is not trying to persuade anybody of anything.

The trouble with cures

My grandmother kept a tin of Vaseline that she believed would fix eleven separate ailments, and she was, as far as I could tell, roughly as healthy as everybody else on her street. I have been thinking about that tin all year, because the cold-water swimmers have arrived at my local reservoir and they have the same look about them.

Let me be careful here, because there is a lazy version of this argument and I do not want to write it. The lazy version says these things are nonsense and the people doing them are fools. That is not true and it is not interesting. Cold water does something; so, probably, did the Vaseline. The question is not whether the ordinary thing works. It is what happens to the ordinary thing when somebody starts selling it.

What happens is that the claim inflates. A swim that leaves you clear-headed for an hour becomes a swim that regulates your nervous system. A walk becomes a protocol. A perfectly good habit acquires a vocabulary borrowed from medicine, and once the vocabulary is medical the thing can no longer simply be enjoyable - it has to be working, and you have to be able to say what it is working on. That is where the disappointment comes from. Nobody is disappointed by a swim. People are disappointed by a cure.

It is true that some of this promising is harmless, and I would not want a world with no enthusiasm in it. When a friend tells me that running has changed her life, she is not making a medical claim; she is telling me she is happier, which is her business and good news. The trouble begins when the enthusiasm is monetised - when there is an app, a subscription, a retreat, a man with a microphone - because at that point somebody's income depends on the claim being larger than the truth.

And the cost is not really money. It is that we lose the ability to do something for no reason. A generation is growing up unable to take a walk without measuring it, or read a book without counting it, or sit in a cold lake for ninety seconds without being told what the ninety seconds are for. Ordinary pleasures are being asked to justify themselves in a language that was invented for illness, and most of them cannot, and so they are quietly abandoned in favour of the next thing that can.

So yes, be suspicious - but be suspicious of the promise, not of the swim. Get in the water. Get in it because it is Sunday, because a friend cancelled, because the reservoir is there and you are not doing anything else. Come out furious. Walk back to the car.

Then, when somebody asks what it did for you, try the most radical answer available: nothing in particular. I enjoyed it. I am going again next week.