Chilly festive dips and cool geese

Friday 27th December 2024

Grey mornings have been usurped by something that can only be described as ‘night’. Were it not for my phone, car clock (not to be trusted - twelve hours out for this half of the year) and the real live radio, I would be easily convinced that I’d got the time wrong.

Outside is dark. It is not actually raining but there is mist, presumably soaking up any motes of stray light, damp enough to make the roads seem darker and to require the occasional swipe. It feels eerily medieval. Without car lights, you’d simply drive into things. Bins, houses, sinister ditches.

It is still dark at the beach, but not quite so. The all-in-one and complete high cloud cover has stolen the sunrise and the horizon. If I squint, I can just about see the divide between sea and sky. My photograph kinda shows a difference.

The birds are behaving as if it is dawn, which of course it should be just after eight am at this time of year, but there is no visible sign of an upcoming sun. In fact, the birds themselves are the visible signs, they know that it’s time to get up and get on, even when their alarm clock is broken.

Cormorants flap along like pterodactyls, disappear fishing and then stand, wings out and dry themselves. Gulls noisily dart about looking for breakfast and when they’ve stopped, sit for a rest on the still water.

There is no wind. Apparently a trickle of air from the south south west. The air temperature is between seven and eight degrees. A dangerous thing to say but it’s not as cold as it should be.

We’ve been stuck under a high pressure system for the best part of a week. Nothing moves. The North Sea ripples and laps. Hats stay on.

While the air temperature is not so bad, water temperature has fallen to seven and a half degrees this morning. Lower than ten. Under eight in fact. A great part of me wishes that I hadn’t known that before I got to the beach.

Even in the gloom, the sea looks beautiful. Big grey ripples of clean water lapping onto a peculiarly picturesque beach. We’re just minutes before the first high tide yet the sea looks like low water.

There’s an enormous sandy strip down to the shoreline, as if someone stole our shingle. The shoreline itself laps shallow. Aside from the cold, there’s no difficulty walking in. The cold is a difficulty walking in, of course, but the feeling is like walking into a very cold lake rather than the sea. There are no scary waves.

I reach the point where my feet no longer touch the bottom. In reality, I’ve unintentionally curled myself into a waterborne fetal position, making a noise, feet out of the water, when I realise that the benign grey sea is pulling like a baddie, tide carrying the un-anchored out, away from the beach and south. Tides are like that.

There’s suddenly a no-panic need to swim towards the shore. At least, I suppose, the movement is warming. Once my feet touch the bottom again, I decide that I’ve done enough and wade out to dry land. I pretend I’ve been in longer than the other three. It’s not true.

I swam on Christmas morning. Don’t usually. A decision made in the early hours of a sad half sleepless dark night.

There was the same all-covering dense high cloud as today but at the beach towards the horizon, there was light (Christmas morning), if only a little. The Christmas day sea looked smooth and glassy pink, like a seamless art nouveau ripple pattern glass.

Christmas morning water temperature was a jolly eight and a half degrees. It felt extremely cold but, like this morning, was somehow less so because there was no biting wind. No movement. It was painless getting dry and into your dry clothes. In my case then getting back into a still sleeping household. Cured. Just a cocoa away from the beginning of Christmas Day.

Yesterday, Boxing Day, we were a few miles along the coast, many of the swimming gang with elf hats on and buckets in hand to support the renowned Aldeburgh Boxing Day swim organised by our very own lawyer.

This year, more than five hundred swimmers took the plunge into Aldeburgh’s cold calm sea, closely watched by seals and local media, to raise many thousands for charity. Puck and the Boatbuilder were in the water for more than twenty minutes. Intrepid life guards, much needed when there’s a tumble of swimmers new to the cold.

This morning, we’re calm again, five not five hundred. Crisp and still and even. The high pressure system is still with us. High cloud caps the sky.

A lopsided series of impossibly long skeins of Greylag geese fly south, high over the water, as we chat and leave.

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