It's encouraging to hear stories of people who've learnt to overcome fear and learn to swim. I definitely feel that private one-to-one lessons are the route I need to take. I found a website that sounded perfect - the instructors were people who had themselves learnt as adults, after years of being afraid - but it turned out that it was one of those annoying websites that claims to be local to you, wherever you happen to be, but actually isn't local at all.