However, the burkini is by no means the first Muslim swimming cossie.
He turned up on time, got into period costume and did what he was told, then they wanted him to take his cossie off and "be himself".
On a chilly weekday there's no one at all in the pool, but I'm getting a picture, on a hot summer day, of a kind of My Big Fat Classless Picnic Paradise, where everyone's the same in a cossie.
Having swum 1500m in the Serpentine, cycled 43km round Hyde Park in a wet cossie and run till she dropped for 10km, she had been denied a share of gold by what seemed like a dodgy art critic's appraisal of that photo-finish.
If you're a complete beginner then, after picking up goggles and a cossie, you might want to invest in lessons.
Following previous pictures of the new Spidey looking ripped and slinky in his skin-tight cossie, this still is presumably designed to appeal to those who like their action flicks spliced with domesticity.
So he got out of his cossie and sloped off home, like, you know, fuck that.
"In the summer, I'll be in there in my swimming cossie, searching for the pipe where the poop goes," says Dick, undiscouraged.
There was a time, in another Doctor age, when viewers (old and young) had to deal with no ethical dilemma greater than whether it was entirely meet to send some ageing, underpaid thesp in a crocheted swamp creature cossie, presumably scented rather funkily with despair and mothballs, careening into the corner-trap where the shaky scenery met the iffy script.
