Ellie Simmonds admits to suffering Paralympics withdrawal symptoms This is not the ebullient Ellie whom our eyes have grown used to seeing smiling, glad-handing, talking to the Prime Minister and posing for the cameras in a specially-adapted Mini. Today she is a more subdued, reflective soul, bereft now that her golden coronations have passed and struggling to re-establish her sense of purpose. "The first training session back was quite hard," Simmonds admits, as she starts tentatively to draw plans for next summer's world championships in Canada. But I know you need targets in life to motivate yourself. Everything has to end some day, I guess. School, initially, was Simmonds" sanctuary for purging anxieties about life "after the Lord Mayor's show." Among her friends in the upper sixth at Swansea's Olchfa Comprehensive, she believed that she could adapt to normality at her own pace. Except she discovered that her double gold, elevating her to the status of Paralympic poster girl, had changed her realities irrevocably. Year Seven pupils, she recalls, started out to shout in the playground, "There's Ellie Simmonds," while her whirl of publicity appearances was disrupting any academic focus. Eventually she decided, with the blessing of mother Val and father Steve, to leave school altogether. "I'm being home-tutored now," she explains. It was hard, because I was never properly in school. I didn't have time to catch up. But I do want to carry on studying and have all the opportunities an education can bring. Simmonds calls out to Val, who increasingly operates as young Ellie's private secretary, to clarify the details of her adjusted curriculum. Part of the rationale is that her grades were suffering. While Simmonds cut a swathe through the Paralympic pool, eclipsing American rival Victoria Arlen to break the S6 400 metres freestyle world record by more than five seconds, her AS-level results were not as impressive: a C in world development and a U in history. Her two contact hours of private tuition are exclusively focused on improving the history mark at least to a pass standard, even if Simmonds knows that the exam in May will most likely fall during her worlds training camp. Not surprisingly for one so endearingly skittish, Simmonds" notions of a future career are all over the place. One moment, after weeks being fawned over by corporate handlers, she is convinced she would like to try public relations; the next she claims she would be quite content to spend her days kneading bread dough. "I love baking," says this avowed lover of carrot muffins, with utter sincerity. At 18, though, her swimming career is yet young, and once coach Billy Pye has shaken her out of her post-Games fatalism work will begin in earnest on mobilising for the next Paralympics in Rio de Janeiro. Her public, captivated by her beaming face in London and by the tenacity she displayed in her frantic, truncated motion in the water, would not have it any other way. Simmonds" nomination among an exalted dozen for Sunday night's BBC Sports Personality of the Year ceremony attests to the indelible imprint that her efforts left upon the summer. On seeing her time for the first gold-medal swim and on hearing the clamour that followed, she looked around in tearful bewilderment, and her reaction to this latest accolade is one of no less shock. "Oh my gosh, I'm so honoured," she says. Being alongside Andy Murray winning the US Open, and Bradley Wiggins winning the Tour de France, I'm so proud, so grateful to be in the top 12. As for her plus-one, or rather plus-two, she confides: "Probably my parents will be coming. I'll think about my dress, too. It's a good excuse to go out and shop. It would not be unexpected if Simmonds features strongly once the breakdown of Sunday's voting figures are disclosed. For the force of her personality, offsetting the practical hindrances caused by dwarfism with an almost permanent and infectious grin, resonated profoundly in the Olympic Park and beyond. The final length of her 400m, where she led Arlen by just 0.08 seconds but fed off the ear-splitting partisan din to cling on, was the Paralympic equivalent of a Mo Farah moment. To this day, she is still not entirely sure how she did it. Leading up to the Games, everything was good: my weight, my head, my training. Even though I was in the best shape possible, a big factor for me was the crowd. It was the first time ever that I had set personal bests and world records in that standard of competition. So London will be a hard act to follow. Has she been in touch with Arlen since? The two of them made a curious couple on the medal rostrum: Simmonds, small of stature but mighty of resolve, with her arm around the paraplegic teenager from North Dakota. Starkly different in their disabilities, they remained the unquestioned queens of their category. We've both been really busy, but we're good friends. We shared a few photos afterwards. Simmonds is unambiguous about what the presence of three Paralympians on the BBC shortlist signifies. Ready for her ticker tape entrance at the Excel Centre with fellow multiple champions Sarah Storey and David Weir, she believes that they could stand a chance in future of being nominated in non-Olympic years. "That's where the legacy needs to be," she argues. Channel 4 did amazingly in showcasing the Paralympics, and the public kept going with it. The people of Britain have seen us as athletes, not as disabled. We train as hard as the Olympians - we give everything. I've been speaking to others with dwarfism and now they're not being stared at. I was doing a masterclass recently and there were 20 disabled swimmers there. I hope that one of those 20 go on to the Paralympics like I did. She speaks with such passion, it is hard to imagine that just weeks ago, she had slipped into the slough of despond. Thankfully, the Ellie smile, which promises to illuminate London's Docklands on Sunday as vividly as a Canary Wharf skyscraper, was not gone for long.