Feels like minus eleven

3rd January 2025

There is light. Just about enough light to see the ice on the windscreen. The solstice has shifted a couple of minutes along after all. It’s also lowered the winter temperature to minus one degrees.

The weather app on my phone says that it ‘feels like minus eleven’. It factors in wind, assuming I’m rather dumb and hadn’t always similarly factored.

I object to electronic ‘feels like’. How the weather feels depends who you are, where you are, how long you’ve been there and what you’re wearing. It feels colder if you’re older and have been waiting for a bus for an hour in a thin coat. If you’re twenty four and jogging along for a coffee with your mate, the morning feels cosy as anything.

Anyway, I’m neither and it feels absurdly cold. The very thought of taking clothes off and getting into cold water seems ridiculous.

The sea water temperature is now seven and a half degrees. My phone fortunately doesn’t predict what that will feel like. Might have to issue a language warning if it did.

Since Christmas, the weather front has changed. We were stuck in a lifeless and lightless high pressure system. This was bashed out of the way by wind and storm. In the east, we’re lucky. The storm that roared across the west and the north left huge numbers of people knee-deep in floods.

Things here have settled now. The wind has swung round so that it’s coming mostly from the north west rather than the south. It’s colder. Feels icy.

This morning, the roughly cut verges bristle with frost. Roadside puddles are frozen. The chocolate furrows born from ploughing are full and frozen too. It’s not a pretty icing sugar frost, more like an old-fashioned winter freeze.

At the beach, the sun bleeds across the horizon and the waking gun metal sea appears scarily beautiful.

The deep golden sun is still leaking dawn fire. Winter dawns wipe summer ones off the chart, in my opinion. Like the temperature, they’re more intense, impossible to ignore. A deep burnt orange strip sitting on top of the horizon, shading the sky above with copper as far as the eye can see.

The wind this morning feels significant. Seventeen miles per hour west-north-west. Not a blow-your-hat-off storm wind, or an East Anglian special take-the-skin-off-your-face north easterly, but a brisk cold breeze. Probably wouldn’t want to walk straight into it. Definitely wouldn’t want it touching your bare damp skin.

It’s an hour after the first low tide and the waves are lively but because the water is relatively shallow, they’re manageable. Knee and waist height as we approach the water’s edge, these waves have the power to push you over but if you fell, you wouldn’t really go anywhere. They’re not going to carry you off into a deep dark sea.

What does seem scary is the seven and a half degree water temperature. It would be nice to say that it sounds worse than it is but it’s as bad as it sounds.

What helps is the distraction of the waves and the movement of the water. Watch the waves as you get in, then you’re there - swimming in head-height water, feet in reach of the ground, keeping an eye on the waves around you and watching with wonder the waves three times taller that are breaking over the sandbank just behind you.

That’s it - it’s all you’ve got time for.

There’s a fairly strong pull north and everyone ends up further along than they started, even with the seasonally-limited swimming times. The tricky part is that, in a lively sea, it’s not always straightforward to get out.

My trigger is suddenly being aware that my legs feel very cold indeed. I usually reach that point in under five minutes at this temperature.

I make the decision to turn in and head for shore

‘I’ll come too.’

The boatbuilder politely decides that he’s also had enough so that he can give me a hand getting out over the soft sandy strip when the waves are biting our ankles from behind.

We did it. There is satisfaction but not much grinning. Everyone has legs the colour of lobster by the time they reach the beach. Now we’re braced for the hard part.

The most important skill is at this time of year is changing. Wet off, dry on. Swap hats, get covered. We each carry a biological stop-clock set to the point at which we lose contact with our hands.

‘Can’t feel my hands.’

‘Damn, my hands have gone.’

‘I’m giving up on socks.’

‘I can’t feel to pull my shoes up. Maybe we should bring a shoe horn?’

It’s a real thing. Even if you get your swimming gear off and your dry gear on as fast as it’s humanly possible, chances are, on a morning like this morning, you’ll lose contact with your hands and your feet.

Mine remain numb for ten minutes after being stuffed inside sheepskin mittens. Then they are even more painful as they come round. At least when they’re numb they’re numb.

The winter sea is breathtakingly beautiful. We are privileged to see it and be a small part of it just after dawn, when the light is fresh and as delicious as the juice from a Christmas clementine. The price to pay is the cold.

Herring gulls swoop and shriek at the shoreline. The wind inhibits lingering and looking further afield.

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