Autumn absence

26th October 2024

Mid-autumn and the trees still hang on to their leaves. Shouty magenta, blondes of all shades, tiny wispy white silver green, hefty dark green dinner plates unchanged from a month ago, all refusing to leave home. Who can blame them?

Will the weather force them down by the end of the month or will kicking through heaps of autumn leaves while dressed as a small vampire become a thing of the past?

A confluence of catastrophe prevented me from swimming on Friday. In truth, it wasn’t really catastrophe or even calamity. Rather inconveniences that had collided to conspire. Enough. Cease. Crikey.

I couldn’t go swimming, and getting to the end of my tired day without it felt harder than usual.

Today, Saturday, I slipped alone into completely still horizon-less water, glazed pink, another mystic lake of a sea, cold at fourteen degrees and wondrous, with the sun in my face and paddle-boarders passing by. It reset my frazzled immunity.

This morning made me wonder about last year and what October had been like and whether I’d missed swims back then or if my moaning and complaining was a more recent phenomenon.

I wrote the following piece at almost exactly this time last year. The sea water was a degree and a half warmer but the weather appalling.

A lesson in gratitude.

Sea swimming is addictive

23rd October 2023

I am actively researching Sea Swimmers Anonymous. Perhaps it is known as SSA?

We’ve missed two swims, almost a week, and I have a physical and mental craving. Babet stole our swimming. Too rough to swim, local rivers breached and roads too flooded to safely get to the beach.

Personally, I struggle without the cold water hit. It’s an addiction. My body feels clunky when I don’t swim, my mind misses the endorphins, the contact with nature, the satisfaction of actually having got in to the North Sea and been enveloped by the energy of the waves.

In this part of the UK, at least, the floods have subsided. We got off lightly. The fields still reflect the brackish residue and smaller roads have thick silt-wash borders, evidence of the light land that pours off the fields when the water comes. One of us has to deal with an office that was window-deep in water.

The storm brought change. It feels colder and damper now. It’s a genuinely autumnal thirteen degrees outside.

However, this morning, there feels like a miracle. When we walk up the shingle bank — the beach has been rearranged into steep ridges by the storm — warm air brushes our faces, as if someone is directing a huge hair dryer from the horizon, blowing comfort, especially for us, straight from North Africa. It feels extraordinary. Gorgeous.

The horizon itself is topped by stripes of golden rising sun, divided by high cloud and beside it, clouds that look like small rounded puffs of smoke from a far off campfire.

The distant enchanted land was painted above a sea that is autumn still, ripples of dark grey-green and the occasional gentle wave.

We are three hours before high tide. The perfect sea has a comfortable depth and before long, Puck has swum out and found the chest-depth sandbank. We follow him but mostly don’t stay long.

It may be beautiful but the sea water, now just over fifteen degrees, has been well and truly stirred up by last week’s weather. Any underwater wisps of vestigial summer warmth have been washed away and the cold deep water temperature that dominates the winter is on its way up to greet us.

The steeply ridged, storm-battered beach is mostly empty. One dog walker and the fisherman getting ready to go out. He must also have missed a week.

The morning after the worst of Babet, the sand had been spread across the shingle and angry waves reached almost to the border of the beach and heath.

When the wind subsides and the waves become reasonable again, treasure hunters populate our beach buzzing their metal detectors in search of metal that has fallen from shipwrecked galleons or dropped from a boat the week before.

This morning’s swim was everything I needed. Healing, restorative, a fix for my addiction. We are all grateful for it. Now it is the tail end of October, the sea could behave in any way at all.

This morning is rare and special, not only because it’s the first time back in for nearly a week, but it’s the Canadian’s birthday. A verified member of Sea Swimmers Anonymous, today we salute the her wit, kindness and courage and the glint in her eye when faced with an enormous wave.

October 2023

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