8th April 2024

The calm after the storm

It is hazy, nearly spring. Eight am still feels like seven, a thin gauze covers the sky. My head still spins from wind. Storm Kathleen blew the weekend out of shape, weirdly warm, wind shouting in your ears, wind in your eyes, too rough for anything let alone the North Sea.

Now at last she has moved on. It feels like the tail end of a persistent headache, relief and the urge to sleep.

This morning’s ten degrees seems comfortably normal. The sun is sleepy behind the haze, alexander has invaded the verges and, as if overnight, the iridescent yellow of oil seed rape is bulging over the fields.

I walk up the beach with Rupert’s Mum whining about the weekend wind. Bikini is camped on the shore waiting for us behind a sea that gently ripples silver, and compared to last week’s bruisers (my knee is still black from repeatedly landing on the shingle), is kind and welcoming and easy to get in.

Beautiful, but it feels cold. The wind on the beach is a stiff twenty one mph south-south-east. The flag is straight out, it feels bearable rather than biting.

The rising water temperatures have been turned back, stirred up by the storm and as a result, the water feels colder than we had anticipated. It’s seven degrees, lower than recently and not the comfortable getting-warmer water that we had begun to expect. The three of us swim in an utterly beautiful sea, silver water scattered with glitter from the freshly risen sun.

We are three hours behind high tide, deep enough water to fully submerge but able to find the bottom without too much effort. No high waves to watch out for, instead a gentle soak in a huge spa pool.

A mysterious barge slowly approaches the buoy; always nice to have something interesting to look at. Having decided that it’s almost certainly the Russian spies continuing their investigations, we then find the mostly-useless mini binoculars in the jumble at the bottom of my bag and read the English writing on the barge’s bow. It slowly lifts the suddenly enormous buoy out of the water.

With any luck, they will replace it with a radical new one. I wish the Canadian were here so that I could test her buoy pronunciation.

The cormorants are low-level fishing and there are expanding rows of evenly spaced pom-poms around the side of the old rig where kittiwakes are beginning to nest. Like noisy rabble playing in the wind, swooping herring gulls do their best to irritate.

A lone young crow leans into the wind at the back of the beach.