Ellie Simmonds, golden girl of the Paralympics, says she will never forget the feeling and doesn't want it to end "I must have taken about a thousand photos," she admits. I've taken it all in. Her anxiety, such as there is in so energetic a character, concerns what comes next. You will often hear triumphant Olympians talk of a desire to escape their bubble of fleeting celebrity, to embrace the quotidian rituals of domestic life once more. But Simmonds, fresh from her haul of two golds, a silver and a bronze, is desperate for her post-Paralympics glow to endure. The disjuncture between national heroine status and her routine reality as a Swansea schoolgirl is almost too disorientating to deal with. "I don't want it to end," she says. I love all the opportunities I have. When all those stop, there's nothing much to look forward to, apart from a holiday. It means it's all over. At times it's easy to feel, "What I have got to motivate myself?" I suppose I have to enjoy this success first, and return to the water gradually. Simmonds is not ready for her final year of sixth form at Swansea's Olchfa Comprehensive, or at least not yet. Such were her pre-London swimming pressures that she did not perform as strongly in her AS-levels as she expected, receiving a C in world development and a U in history. Already her mother Val, sitting outside for this interview, has called her head of year to arrange for her to retake history classes. "I'm going to have quite a long break," she acknowledges, having already planned to take a trip to New York for her 18th birthday in November. School was quite hard in the run-up to London. It had to take a back seat, but I love the place to pieces. My school have been so supportive in the balance between my sport and my studying, ever since I won the two golds in Beijing. I couldn't have asked for better support through what was the biggest year of my life. But it is the backing from her parents that has involved the greatest sacrifice. When young Ellie, always Eleanor to her mother and father, first became serious about swimming from the age of five, Val would prise her out of bed at 5.30am five mornings a week, in time for two hours of training before lessons and another 90 minutes afterwards. So onerous was the regime that, to support her ambitions, the family split in two, Val and Ellie moving to South Wales, so that she could use Swansea's world-class 50-metre pool, while her father Steve, brother and three sisters all stayed at home in the West Midlands. The decision was an emotional wrench, but Simmonds" relationship with her father, an environmental consultant, has deepened as a consequence. I text my dad a lot. I live with my mum from Monday to Saturday morning and when I see my dad it's very special, because we don't have much time with each other. We do lots together at weekends, though. I would say I'm closer to my dad but I love my mum the same. Her support network was firmly intact in London, where she was watched by 30 immediate family members, all of whom shared in the febrile atmosphere that her four medal-winning swims generated. Sweetly understated, Simmonds says: "They don't show too much feeling in front of me. I just hope that they're proud of me. Never was the mood in that 15,000-seat arena more fervid than for Simmonds" opening gold, when she overhauled Arlen after trailing for three-quarters of the race. The distance between the two had never been more than a body length but, as Simmonds hit the 350m mark 0.08 seconds clear, she seized an advantage she was never prepared to relinquish. Her abbreviated, frantic swimming action, requiring frequent lungfuls of air, appeared to capture a philosophy she had practised almost from the cradle: that in spite of her size, she would simply try twice as hard as everyone else. Her victory was doubly impressive for the fact that Arlen, paralysed below the waist after a devastating virus, had only been confirmed as an S6 swimmer four hours before. Arlen had been in a vegetative state for two years, but the International Paralympic Committee questioned whether her disability was severe enough to warrant inclusion in Simmonds" category. The controversy, ultimately, did not distract Simmonds, but it underlined the fiendish difficulties inherent in the classification system. How, to put it bluntly, was one supposed to draw direct medical equivalence between a dwarf and a paraplegic? "They see us all as having the same ability in the water," Simmonds explains. I have two shorter arms, which in their eyes equal one big arm, and two shorter legs. Victoria's two big arms work out as roughly the same. I think they get it right. Simmonds, it transpired, did not simply weather the dispute over Arlen but flourish, knocking an extraordinary five seconds off the world record in the 400m free. Overnight, she became the emblem of a transformative Games, meeting the Prime Minister and helping to extinguish the Paralympic flame alongside sprint star Jonnie Peacock. Who is to tell what she could accomplish in Rio in 2016, or even beyond? I'd love to be a role model and inspire people in Paralympic sport. I don't want just to be a swimmer - I want to go to university, maybe get a job as well. The future is a concept with which Simmonds grapples constantly. "It keeps changing what I want to do when I'm older," says this unabashed home girl, who has admitted to a weakness for carrot muffins. Maybe something in baking. Ellie Simmonds is a member of the BMW London 2012 Performance Team. For more information on BMW and London 2012 visit www.bmw.co.uk/london2012