18th March 2024
I'm off sick. There's a lot of it about. Here's a splash from March 2023. Hope you like it.
My eight-year-old voice fills my head. ‘I’m so lucky, I’m so lucky, we’re so lucky’.
Sometimes, even after so many swims from this little beach, the sheer and unadulterated beauty of the sea is overwhelming.
The water is molten silver, with a soft sunlight path rippling to the horizon. It’s a dirty window sun, just powerful enough to light the way to the enchanted kingdom, not enough to cause a squint or spoil the view.
The beach land temperature is minus two. A quick and easy windscreen scrape but the cruel north easterly makes it feel like something else entirely. Looking at the beauty with hat and mittens and coat on, completely dry, it doesn’t look cold at all, just enticing rippling silver into the ancient world beyond.
If I was alone, to be honest, the view and the air and the salty mist that leaves a taste on your lips whether you notice it or not, would be enough. Observing beauty is an enhancing thing. The sea never rests, it’s different every moment. The thinking man’s TV and then some.
Today, the sea has a small fluffy edge, a little bounce as the gentle waves hit the strip of gritty sand just in front of it. It makes it look more beautiful, if anything, as if someone has taken the trouble to sew a white fluffy fringe to the water to improve the look and enhance the soundtrack.
Our Canadian is back and wet-suited and, in a moment where herd mentality overrides rational thought, we are in, the small core family. I’m not quiet, noisily persisting with my deep vagus nerve noise. I will be free of ill health and live forever or at least make the others laugh and distract myself from the biting, spiky cold of the sea. The water is 6.1 degrees, apparently. Perhaps it feels colder because of the air temperature. Perhaps it feels colder because the sea is reasonably still.
In not many moments, the spikiness is unbearable to me, every part of limb sticking out of my short wetsuit is bright red. Time to get out and hurry, hurry, hurry. Get away from the cold wind and start the week anew.
