Swimming in autumn colour

1st November 2024

A fresh new month. The seagulls are cleaning up juicy morsels that have been unearthed in freshly ploughed dark chocolate fields.

Hedges are holding on to blonde and chestnut highlights for now, but it looks like winter thinnings could happen any day.

The car says ten degrees. The weather is still and grey. Not yet cold enough for picturesque coverings of mist (picturesque until you’re driving through them).

Unless you sit still in front of a computer, the weather is not cold. Move about. Damp is good for your skin. Hang wet swimming kit on the line. Take it off three hours later and attempt to spot the difference. None. We’re mostly windless.

At the base of a small but steep shingle bank is an endless grey-shade infinity pool. The sky is a dense complementary blue, selected, perhaps, by the editor of an prestige interior design magazine to bring the best out the best of the feature grey below. They chose well. It’s a mesmeric mix.

From a distance, the still grey sea is populated by a tightly-knit collection of colourful swimming hats; bright red, blue, grey, black and orange. From time-to-time, one swims off and then returns back again, like a billiard ball bouncing off an imaginary cushion.

Once you’ve tottered down the small steep shingle bank, there are a series of not quite so steep shingle ridges, under-water speed bumps slowing your entrance to the pool’s shallow end.

At eight am, we’re two hours before the first high tide. It’s a lovely swimming depth, the part of the pool that’s about half way between the deep end and the shallow . It feels secure, touch the bottom if you like, float about if you like, splash and chat and ping away and back again and behave like a happy family smugly enjoying a swim before breakfast.

The swimming pool is a relaxing place, there’s no water movement that requires close attention, not much pull, jellies have gone to warmer water. The water temperature here is just over fourteen degrees, same as last Friday, a little warmer than yesterday, apparently. Can’t currently get my head around that one.

The cool water is much as you’d expect in an unheated lido. It’s a refreshing temperature, you don’t want to hang about in it all day, nor do you want to wobble in, turn around, wobble out as quickly as you can and scramble back up the small steep shingle bank.

There are no waves, well no waves to speak of. Titchy tiny ripples, as if a toddler is sitting on the side and splashing its heels in the water.

Essentially, we’ve had no waves for a week. It’s a weird sea, lifeless, peaceful, excellent for swimming but spookily still. A hangover from Halloween yesterday or some kind of foreboding, calm before the next storm? Perhaps the sea is saving the waves, holding onto the energy for something massive lurking just out of view over the horizon?

The shingle is very pretty, by the way. Damp like the weather. Damp brings out the colour of the tiny pebbles at the shoreline, emphasises the different tones, scraps of shell, net shreds, tiny galleon fragments.

Absence of wind makes the most difference on the beach. We’re in winter-wear. Colourful towels, robes in reds and blues and greys and blacks some bobbles. A pair of dark red deckchairs on the beach too too this morning, in the sea earlier than us, now thermal mugs and watching.

We take our time. No ouch-hurry, no urgency to get swimwear off and clothes on before fingers are completely and bloodlessly useless. Slow changing.

The cormorants, wings out, are drying themselves on the old rig.

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