I go to the beach. I see the inside of the shack for the first time. Both of these things are three months late. Not ‘too late’. Just later than they should have been. I don’t do anything with the shack other than figure out how the locks work and re-secure it. I don’t do anything at the beach other than sit. I sit on the shingle, where it runs out into sand. The tide has not long turned and the sand is wet. I dig my toes into it and ignore the flies.
I smell seaweed. Rotting.
I smell salt air.
I watch the waves, tumbling weeds I cannot name, as if trying to wash them clean, and wonder ‘if I had my gear would I really walk out to swim among the weed?’ I haven’t learned to love seaweed yet.
But I love the spume, frothing the shoreline. I love how under the hazy sky the water shades out from brown (over the sandy shallows) through greys and blues to a definite midnight-blue line at the edge of the world. The sun isn’t glinting off the wind farm today, but if you know it’s there you can just about make out the shapes of the turbines.
I love the way the light changes on the water reflecting the changing sky. The haze clears. The white caps dance more brightly. A couple of body-boarders stroke slowly past, just seaward of the breakwater, and I wonder again if I will swim. Not today. But this year? Or next? Will I lock everything bar the key on a string in the shed and walk out into the water? After all, wasn’t that the point?
Or one of them.
The other is to write. To breathe in this air and see what it inspires. Sea-spray memories, salted journeys, myths, make-believe, reality? I have no idea.
Today I open a book and pick up a pen, but I simply sit on the shingle and watch the waves on the ebbing tide, combing lower and lower the sleek greenery growing on the groynes, turning the pebbles, creating hag-stones, turning the weeds. White horses continue to gallop up to the shore, even though they’re retreating.
I brush the flies away and dig my toes deeper into the cold wet sand. I don’t write.
I walk in the shallows without bothering to turn up my leggings.
I pick up pebbles, looking for the one that will sit on my shelf, labelled only in my memory (maybe), the one that will come to mean ‘this day’. This back at the beach day. I know most of the pebbles on my shelf, but not all of them, some of them have already been washed away on another ebbing tide.
This day. The day after three months of going nowhere. The day I finally ventured out again, out beyond my lockdown bubble of small shops and near walks, river and Broad, out through the City centre and out to where there the waves are larger than ripples.
And found how ordinary it was,
And wasn’t.
Mid-July and I had a stretch of beach to myself.
Mid-July and I have a beach shack, but I’m not allowed to sit in front of it – though the kiosks and cafés are open for business and have their tables out.
Mid-July…and I am finally back on the beach. The shack is mine for the next five years at least. There’s no rush. It will get swept and painted and, slowly, it will acquire stuff.
Back in the city there has evidently been a cloud-burst. I walk under a clear blue sky reflected in wet pavements and puddles. I walk home. I have braved the train. Busses are still a step too far.
I come home. Shower and change and cook and eat and message friends and watch TV and think about ‘home’. Someone once remarked how quickly I live my way into a place and how thoroughly. In that light, being here is at once obvious and strange. I haven’t become complacent about it yet. I stop when I catch sight of my bare feet on the hall floor, or I am caught by the lilt of the light in the living room, and I look around me, and it still feels like a special place, nothing so mundane as just where I live.
And I like that.
There is sand on the bathmat, and I imagine I can still smell salt in my hair. I hold the piece of stone, with its colours looking like an extract from a faded map of some other shoreline. It is smooth and heavy and has to be angled precisely to fit into my palm.
And I like that too.
All of it.
The way things fit and the way they don’t. The normality and the strangeness. It feels like an ending.
And a beginning.
