21st June 2024

4am summer solstice

We are heathen. It is four am. Summer solstice, the longest day and the shortest night. The start of summer. Now is not the time to discuss whether the the solstice should have been yesterday. Four am is not the time to discuss anything.

My brain is not sufficiently charged up to speak. I’ve told Cousin not to speak.

The car says eight degrees outside. There is a damp mist over the fields, doubling the height of the nearly mature crops. It is an ethereal maze, impossible to see through but sufficiently flat topped to see over. Above, the still-sleepy sky is pale pink.

The beach sky is pale pink too. Super-low tide, so low that the bottom sand lifts its head through the water at the low point and lays there, as if an extra moated beach is normal.

The puddle height water makes getting into the sea implausibly easy, as if a spell has been cast to draw us in. Perhaps Narnia is out there after all and all it takes is some enchanted morning to find it?

Another tribe is already on the beach. They are more colourful than us, noisier, they ‘whoop’ and take pictures of one another bouncing on the sand. Blonde princess hair is lit by a crown of fairy lights and shells. Lots of bright orange swimming balloons and a fire pit.

The other tribe is known to us and we smile weakly. We don’t have a fire pit that gently wafts sweet-smelling wood smoke over the beach. We don’t generally ‘whoop’ and we rarely take pictures of one another. Our swimming hats are grey bonnets, the only exciting thing about them is that they make our heads look a little like seals. When there’s fog.

We are quite dry. If ever there was a less appropriate description for a messy bundle of mostly dark-clothed year-round swimmers. We’re generally quite quiet, we greet, sometimes hug, frequently grunt at one another, share little tickly laughs. But we don’t have a fire pit highlighted in the fresh dawn light.

We are watching the clock, watching watches. Mrs Iron Woman has a watch that works in the water and she always know how long things last. The sun is due to rise at four thirty. We don’t want to go into the water too early because the air is chilly and we’d get cold waiting around while submerged.

The other tribe head off, noisy in celebration, and we’re right beside them. We hurry across the super low water, to the exposed sand bank and over the other side to sea that’s deep enough to swim in or at least stand with water to your waist or thereabouts, depending on how far you go.

We all stare towards the horizon.

We wait. The end of the world is decorated with a curtain of pale pink cloud, thick enough to conceal the beginning of sunrise. We wait. It is time and it feels like the sun might be quietly rising up behind its curtain, ready to launch the start of the day.

Before. 4.23am

We wait. Four thirty has come and sailed away again. It’s beginning to feel a little cold in the water. Would going in slow the sun coming up? Probably not.

We traipse in, through the sweet wisps of wood smoke and, as we reach the end of the lapping low water, turn back and see that at last the sun has risen, popping its face out from behind the curtain of cloud. Whoop.

It’s difficult to do justice to the beauty of the sea and the sky that early in the morning. The pale blues and pinks, gunmetals, polished to a high gloss by thin rippling water, deep pink clouds, golden highlights, ta-da sun that genuinely seems to set the sky on fire.

After. 4.51am

We look. We slowly leave the beach, noting that it does feel rather cold, especially having spent so long in the cool water.

Thankfully, today only we have hot coffee in flasks and, even still without a firebowl, we have a hut. A secret and hidden place, once a thing of beauty only for fishermen, black-tarred weather-worn ship lap. Destined to be a wind-proof changing place for the winter months. Now transformed into a shed, a place to store inflatable craft and gas burner cooking equipment.

Puck and the Electrician cook bacon baps and we stand together smiling and talking, as well as is possible at that time of the morning, drinking from flasks and the whistling kettle and sharing the things that have travelled to the pre-dawn beach with us. Nuts and flapjacks, apricot ears and a frankly magnificent deeply-iced vegan chocolate sponge cake, in anticipation of Mrs Professor Peru’s forthcoming birthday.

Our friend from Ness is tucking in beside me and we congratulate ourselves on the nutritional wisdom of eating chocolate cake before six in the morning. On the one hand, we’re getting in early; calories, sugar and chocolate rations - sorted. There’ll be no need to worry about any of them for the rest of the day.

Secondly, the cake doesn’t count. Calorie counting starts at six am. Whoop. We’re pre-dawn heathens.

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