The holiday season is here. Tabloid newspapers are carrying daily picture updates on Katie Price's almost entirely nude summer beach holiday. And, as of yesterday, official photographs of Vladimir Putin's annual outdoor adventure break have appeared.
In the past, Putin has been presented to us smouldering at the end of his fishing rod, or simply stripped to the waist in some outdoor idyll, ready to wrestle a bear or kung-fu kick a small bush. This time the holiday snaps show Russia's prime minister swimming. And not just floating on his back, or doing a serene, albeit vaguely emasculating, breaststroke. Putin, of course, is doing the butterfly.
This makes a lot of sense. The fly is the most aggressively athletic of all the strokes. It requires both arms to rotate simultaneously, combined with an unremittingly difficult two-legged kick. It is not something many mere mortals would attempt in the hotel pool.
You can see why Putin opted for the fly rather than, say, the backstroke. The fly is the ultimate statement stroke. It's ultra- modern, too, first swum either in 1933 by Henry Myers at the Brooklyn YMCA, or 30 years previously by Jack Stephens – later a second world war code-breaker at Bletchley Park – who claimed to have invented the fly at a public swimming baths in Belfast.
There are also problems with the fly. It may have a fug of raw, sweating masculinity about it, but it's also the most irritating of all strokes. It's splashy and unsociable, an uncompromising stroke that pays no heed to the elderly gentleman choking on chlorinated backwash in the neighbouring municipal lane.
And so, as ever with these propaganda pictures, it's tempting to look for deeper meaning. Isolationist, prone to aggressive display and not afraid of making waves: could Putin's fly also be a kind of aquatic metaphor for the way his Russia is heading? And if so, what does the one where he's feeding a horse mean?
