A splash of sunny spring

Wednesday 5th March

There was something about this morning that felt like the toe-bouncing, squeaking start of spring.

The sun is so bright that, despite scraping wet ice from the windscreen of the car, it melts any possibility of winter blues.

In the car, the temperature says three degrees, the forecast is for one on the beach with a gentle, almost soothing breeze from the south west. And the south west is always warm, right?

The cloud is high and clean like fresh stretched-out cotton wool. The sun pokes through a hole that isn’t quite big enough, as if someone had wiggled and pushed through with a finger. We have a small shining bright sun face with rough edges.

Fortunately, beneath the stretched-out cotton cloud is a thick band of cloudless sky that lets the sunlight leak on to the water. The cloudless strip has given the sun room to chuck a great bucket of glitter, sprinkling a path from the horizon almost to the shoreline.

At the horizon, the glitter is gold, like an expensive jewellery advertisement on top of the sea. The glitter becomes silver as it leaks out over the water delicately painting the top of each tiny wave.

To be honest, the movement this morning is more ripple than wave, as if someone had come out early and stirred the unusually clean water with an oar or a stick.

At eight, we’re twenty minutes before the first low tide. It is almost possible to see the sandbank which becomes a barrier in the sea and creates a lagoon which is just deep enough to swim in, if you don’t mind banging your knees every now and then.

There’s a fat handful of grinning swimmers. The earlies (Lawyer and Boatbuilder nearly always straggle) sit down to change in a messy line facing the sea.

Puck says that the shingle on which we’ve parked our stuff is damp so people move back to make a new messy line further from the water. I want to cross the wide copper-coloured strip of sand so that I can take pictures of the sea so I don’t move my stuff and instead insulate myself from the damp with my robe which I know is at least dry on one side. Bikini and I have our own messy line.

In an unmanaged sequence, the gang gets into the water. Iron Woman and Bikini settle themselves, find the depth with knee knocks and then swim, swim, swim, heading south before turning back again.

The Canadian and Rupert’s Mum are in the lagoon, mini swimming. Puck heads straight for the sandbank and prances back and forth, doing pretend disco dancing in perfect silhouette against the rising sun.

I’m not in the water for long. I take my feet off and swim around, get wet and out again. The wave ripples are so light that you don’t feel them as you swim. The tide, however, is stronger. It very much wants to take you northwards and if you hang about, you find yourself travelling.

Despite the sun, despite the grinning swimmers, the water remains bitingly cold. This morning, the sea water temperature is five and a half degrees. I can’t not feel it and at the moment, following a swim, I keep feeling it throughout the day.

I’m trying to be brave and put myself on a considered, weekly swimming routine until the water gets a bit warmer. That’s what I tell myself anyway.

The kittiwakes are flitting and flirting over the water. It’s Ash Wednesday. I use up my contemplative time recognising that the world actually does keep turning despite human intervention. The birds have come back, they haven’t given up.

Before we know it, kittiwakes will have chosen their spots on the side of the old rig and be building a tight terrace of cosy, bespoke nests which dangle with dead grasses like inexpert thatch.

In the car park, the pied wagtails are back, bouncing and wagging as they peck at unimaginable tasty morsels that appear on the fine, impacted gravel of the car park.