17th June 2024

Reasons to be cheerful

Sky-born nutritious goodness. In your face at the start of the day. Sunshine. At last sunshine. A reason to be cheerful.

I am searching for reasons. Poppies popping their petals over the verge grass. Bright red highlights. Pale purple mallow. Dastardly ragwort becomes fringed yellow starbursts.

At last there is sun, at least to wake up to, not chill winds and rain.

At the beach, beside the path to the sea, there is thick, soft beach grass with heads like blonde barley that blow together as if they’re forming the coat of a crouching furry animal. A reason.

The sun shines and the sea laps a sandy shore that makes up a wide, busy and mostly untrammeled strip between between the shingle and the water.

The beach temperature is around fourteen degrees. It’s not lying on your towel weather but nor is it uncomfortable. The breeze, which has been hitting us hard and intermittently throwing cold rain at us from the south west all weekend, has become a gentler west south westerly at around eighteen mph. Cool but not cold.

At eight am, we’re just fifteen minutes from full high tide. The sea is a pool, easier to get in and out of, easier to swim in; you’re full body depth within a few feet, although there is the remains of last week’s sand bank, which was washed within meters of the shore. There are people standing barely five metres out. In usual high tides, they’d be floating.

I think it’s a reason to be cheerful.

‘There’s jellyfish,’ Puck tells me delightedly, when I get out there and joke about doubting his sea temperature reading. ‘Sea must be pretty warm or they wouldn’t be here, would they? We don’t normally see them until July.’

We don’t. He doesn’t say which type of jellyfish or which part of the sea or whether he’s seen one, or someone told him, or if I’m about to bump into a great jelly mass. I don’t ask any more questions. Don’t want to know.

He is a reason to be cheerful. In my opinion, jellyfish are not. Although I’m cheerful that they haven’t become extinct and that the North Sea is healthy enough to support them. I am cheerful that they haven’t all become submerged in sewage in the English Channel.

The Canadian and I swim around and pass the time of day and look towards the horizon that bares the sun and against which is a large and fantastical pool of glitter.

If ever there was a reason to be cheerful.

I head out first. I’m a quick dresser. I hate being cold and mostly choose the comfort of my hat once I’m clothed.

I take a few pictures and a little video of the magnificent sea then have a closer look at the strip of sand. A jelly baby, tiny new, blob-sized moon jellyfish, the first of the season.

A lucky stone - a big one with a hole right through the end and a dainty almost pink stone or maybe a shell shaped like a heart. Love, luck, jellyfish. Who wouldn’t be cheerful at that?

I have an Instagram account called @NorthSeaFanClub. I post videos of the sea each time I swim.