Frozen shingle, frozen sand

10th January 2025

The pre-dawn sky was an unimaginably delicate pink. Pale, beautiful baby pink, a waking cheek above a dark duvet.

The car said minus four. The forecast for the beach said minus six. Everything is frozen or covered in frost. The car is frozen and covered in frost and Cousin kindly chips away.

We don’t have any snow, not a flake this winter, despite the forecast and the blanketing drifts that cover parts of the rest of the country. We have cold and frost.

Cold and frosts that freeze puddles and coat roads with thin layers of white or invisible black ice such that I worry about slipping off and smashing through the top of a frozen puddle. Car in sinister ditch, wheels spinning.

You might think that the aches and pains and winter wear must be quite bad to want to head to the beach at this time. Pretty bad to want to head to the beach with the intention of swimming, at least.

If you’re planning a walk, better wait for later when the temperature has come round a bit. It’s not quite dawn after all. My aches and pains are pretty bad this morning and I can’t think of anything that has the potential to improve them other than to submerge myself in cold water.

Added to which, the sea is beautiful and the dawn is beautiful, especially when you’re watching it live on the very edge of the east of the country. In all sorts of ways, the sheer beauty of it all is transformative.

The beach looks magnificent. The sun is just peeping its head over the horizon. It rises astonishingly quickly, a sliver of a peep to fully up in less than a minute.

The sun turns baby pink into baby blue and adds a thick layer of juicy morning orange, flowing across the horizon. Already healthy.

The sea is a gentle pewter, rippling small and heavy waves only at the beach edge. Nothing to worry about. We’re an hour and a quarter after the first high tide. A nice depth for swimming. Comfortable. If the water temperature wasn’t just a tiny weeny bit over SEVEN DEGREES.

We’ll come back to that.

For now, we’re on the beach, getting ready to go in. The shingle is frozen. It has a certain look when the beach is this cold. It loses its cute and shiny wet pebble look and instead appears as if it’s been coated in a thin layer of flour rather than icing sugar. The mini mussel shells look like ancient relics. Everything appears fossilised.

It’s not appealing, it doesn’t catch the light. It’s just hard and uncomfortable and cold. The shore-side wide strip of sand is frozen too. Not very pretty looking either. The part that gets wet when the waves land on it stops being frozen of course and immediately becomes darker and minimally more attractive.

The wind is from the west-north-west. Often, westerlies aren’t too bad, they come across the country, the land knocks the sharp edge off them. Wind with a north aspect, not so much. They’re seaborn, frequently made in the arctic and they’ve very efficient carriers of cold.

Ten mph is quite gentle comparatively, but when the beach is this cold, you don’t want to linger in a west-north-westerly. Essentially, you don’t want to linger.

The shingle and the sand are frozen but the sea is not frozen. At a measly seven degrees, the water is warmer than the air that surrounds it. You’d think that the comparison would make it feel warm, perhaps if you stood in your cossie for a couple of hours, lowering your core temperature to the surrounding minus six, it would feel warm. But you’d be dead, so it’s probably not worth it.

As it is, the sea water doesn’t feel warmer, it feels very cold indeed.

This morning, the water was at first dip a cold healing pool. Quite still and waveless, a close-to-shore depth that means that you can stretch to full height if you wish and absorb the cold water therapy. For a minute or two it is healing, then instantly, it reverts to feeling freezing. The temperature quickly expels you.

Then it’s clumsy, awkward, hands-numb changing from wet to dry. As many dry layers as possible and and hats and mittens and away from the beach as soon as you are able.

The gulls continue to swoop and shriek and when they’re not, they sit on the water, fooling the innocent (and those that didn’t bring their specs) into thinking the dark object in the mid distance is the emerging head of a seal.

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