1st April 2024
Who's the April Fool?
Easter has resurrected dark mornings. First light from the East is lightweight and an hour later. I set out into grey. Overcast, left-over roadside puddles, damp and drear, seven degrees, half seven.
There are not many cars but there is a kestrel, just above and beyond me as if I have seen him in a dream. There is a rumour that people lay in on Bank Holidays. That must be the April Fool’s joke.
I walk up to the beach with the Canadian. I am wearing my magnificent new hat, honed by her own capable hands. Not only does it have ear flaps so that it doesn’t blow off in the wind (and to stop the wind blowing into my ears) it has a secret mark showing front and back so that I can put it on the right way. She has experience of my fluid left/right direction finding.
‘You will look like a Viking,’ she said, when it was in its final stages.
I am a Viking, delighted to have been accurately identified. There’s a lot of us with a certain colouring, hidden in plain sight in coastal East Anglia.
Bikini and the Professor Perus were already on the beach. The shoal was forming. We wondered about April Fool pranks but could think of none. It isn’t quite the weather for throwing one another into the water, or tipping people out of canoes.
The sea, although grey to match the grey sky, was friskier than expected. We were an hour ahead of low tide. Lengthy patches of flat water lull one into a false sense of complacency before heavy rolling waves show their strength. They are flicked up by a 14 to 25 mph gusting west-south-westerly which showed itself on the flag and chilled wet skin.
Puck joins us and of course already has a prank involving the imminent closure of the beach due to the authorities having uncovered an unexploded bomb. Bikini has similarly planned reports of early and extensive jellyfish.
The water is eight degrees. It takes some getting in, repeated crashing waist-height waves, pushing back as soon as you make a move towards the water. A momentary pause in the sequence gives me enough space to leap inelegantly forward, over the shore crash, into the space where we swim.
The water feels cold, perhaps because we are earlier than usual, perhaps because it’s grey. I turn and head to shore. No easy way out. Wait for the wave sequence to pass. There’s more. Wait wait. Start to feel cold. Now, let’s go for it. I’m on my hands and knees, almost out before the wave. The next big one creeps up on Professor Peru just when it looked like he was home and dry.
Puck helped us and then went back in for another session. We panted across the shingle to get dressed and suddenly, through the breeze, the sun appeared and warmed us and shed its silvery light on the water.
The sea is always the prankster. Cunning and powerful and, like all great jesters, a master of timing, holding out for exactly the right moment to leave you flat on your face.
A cormorant, drying itself on the old rig, watched us fall.
