Gotta love it

Friday 14th February 2025

The morning is wheelie-bin grey but the cruel easterly with the power to topple them has at last abated. The car says two degrees, no scraping at least. Weather apps are full of ‘feels likes’, pushing one’s spirit below zero.

It’s the wind. It’s always the wind in East Anglia. We’re in the process of saying good riddance to the persistent easterly which, on weather forecast charts, looked as if people in the Netherlands were firing arrows at us.

Sharp and painful, there have been days when it has felt like being hit by actual arrows. Cept we have no beef with the Netherlands. Enough global beef without that.

As we get closer to the sea, it looks as if someone has dropped great blocks of gold on the horizon, hefty, shining, each leaving its own fat smear from where it had fallen. We follow gold.

At the beach, the tail end of the easterlies is stirring up the water. The final arrows in the quiver spiking the water before conditions turn. Now are the last few moments of east-north-east before the vane turns to east-south-east and then, by the end of today, south east. A different animal altogether. That’s the forecast at least.

The beach was around four degrees (feels like minus one) and the shingle and the sea is populated, not only with my gang but also visiting bobble hats.

Almost a dozen swimmers, as if everyone had been longing for a swim and this was the first sliver of opportunity in a week.

At eight am, we were two hours beyond the first low tide. The water was still shallow-ish but very messily choppy. Chop chop ouch chop, like the first day at catering college. From the swimmable area between the shore and the sandbank, big grey-green uneven waves arrived at head height and waist height and randomly in between.

I walk in, three waves break against my hips and the feeling that one more, if it were stronger, could knock me over. Forward, body in, feet off, swim a little, strangely unaware of the cold because of the concentration needed to watch for incoming waves. Feet down, jump forward, and up, arms outstretched as if part of a watery line out.

Except today isn’t a team match. The weather demands in and out. Friends in the water, friends on the beach again. We cuckoo clock back and forth, frequently swimming solo or in pairs. Only you know when your moment has come.

Water temperature is seven degrees. At some point seven has has become re-positioned in our heads from unthinkably spikily dreadful to not too bad. I think it was the five degree moment. Literally nothing feels more dreadful than five degrees.

What made it swimmable? The shallow depth, probably. Get knocked over by a wave and you won’t go far. There wasn’t a massive tide pull and the waves themselves, although they looked big when they approached, no longer carried the full force of the easterly arrows. They also provided some shelter from the residual wind.

This morning’s swim felt ridiculous. Absurd that anyone would want to get into an unattractive North Sea in February. Ridiculous for the moments, maybe minutes, that I am in there, feet off, throwing myself over incoming waves, again and again and then enough.

I turn round, looking to the waves to push me in and scrambling over impossibly moving shingle, feet, hands and knees and feet again, racing against the wave closest behind me until I’m clear and not open to a cold crash over my head. Puck effortlessly strolls beside me.

Changing is cold and quick and uncomfortable with brief and practiced niceties and well worn wit. ‘Pretend you’re out and getting dry,’ to the late-arriving Boatbuilder who was putting his gloves on to get in after everyone else was out.

The thick dirty cloud that had looked so grey earlier had become a thick, apparently impenetrable old and worn blue grey blanket. The blanket’s end had been kicked up to reveal a pale gold strip over the horizon. Look closely and the gold has brighter lines, rays that reach down to the water, like a child’s illustration of the shining sun.

The Professor Perus, academic in their dark robes, were enjoying a bracing sea breath stroll rather than a dip. ‘Look closely and you will see the windmills’ they said. Briefly I spot what look like upright matchsticks on the horizon but I look again and they are gone. My sight distracted by rays and waves most probably.

Beyond the sandbank, cormorants are fishing. Pterodactyls flapping close to the bumpy surface of the water and then disappearing and, if you watch long enough, (if it’s possible to stand still long enough without freezing) they reappear implausibly far away, having held spare air in their wings.

Herring gulls are flying high today, well out of the way of the wave splash.

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