3rd June 2024

The sea lifts you up

The world weighs heavy. Worry. War. Fabricated scarcity. It pulls people down.

The thing is, the sea hasn’t noticed - it’s happily swooshing around, travelling the world, reaching for the moon, playing with fishes.

The plants are hootless too. The oat grass, rye grass and timothy that monopolise the verges are dedicated only to making people itch, scratch and wheeze. The occasional fragrant elderflower that poses above them isn’t bothered either - it cares only about being attractive enough to bear glossy black berries.

There’s a few poppies too - drops of blood in the grasses. They don’t worry about the world, they’re purely reminders.

Nature is there to distract us. We’ve turned in to June almost without noticing and again the green that surrounds us thinks nothing of it. There are no particular markers for the beginning of the month.

Loping up the shingle, the sea appears endless, rippling pewter with an enchanted silver glitter pool anchored to the horizon.

This morning the sun shines and it’s around fifteen degrees. The wind is kind, a breeze of around five mph from the north west. You wouldn’t want to sit on the beach all day but it’s not a problem getting changed. The sky is covered by a high and thin patchy cloud, not enough to stop the sun immersing our faces.

The sea temperature is reportedly over twelve degrees but it feels cold. Perhaps because it’s pretty deep. At eight a.m., we’re an hour before the first high tide so the sea is full. It feels more like swimming in a deep pool but frequently seems chillier than when the water’s shallow.

The water is pulling us north and beachward as the tide rises. The force is strong today, and if you don’t concentrate, you end up along the beach at the boats. The water is wonderfully smooth with small ripples and the occasional untimed swell of a high fat wave which is better managed further out than nearer the beach when there’s the chance that it will break all over you.

Waves are energy, their job is to move energy from one place to another. Who knows if this occasional swell is the residue of a storm in the north or a weather incident further east. When you’re submerged in waves, it’s impossible to believe that your body doesn’t absorb some of that energy, catching it as it washes around you.

The sea is all-encompassing. When you’re in the middle of it, and personally, I’m sure that I feel it more in a high tide than low, you feel that you are a guest in something so vast and powerful, unimaginably big and with the strength to break rock.

Today, the sea is noisy too. Big fat breaks on the shingle that throw the energy down and suck it back in.

The Canadian is back from her far north adventure. I squeeze her shoulders — a hug in the sea is risky when the hugee’s feet aren’t touching the bottom. We have an open sea catch up. Heard only by the wind and the waves.

Swimming in the sea lifts you up; up and away from the world that could be bringing you down.

The high-vis out-of-place lupins look brighter than ever.

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