The sea restores a miserably grey morning

30th October 2023

It is hard to feel positive. The sun, which earlier briefly poked its pale face out, is now firmly tucked back under a thick grey duvet of cloud. Many of the hedges have been machine trimmed and look raw and spikey as if they are badly shaved. The roadside colour is a uniform Army green, just the occasional stray tuft of small yellow hawthorn, leaves not yet fallen.

I am five minutes early to the beach. I linger for the others, looking and looking for signs of beauty and hope but the puddles are muddy and worn, the sky grey without clever clouds. No sun, no sunlit strand.

The Canadian arrives and says happily, ‘It’s eleven degrees’, which until that moment, I would not have recognised as a positive thing. But it’s a whole eleven degrees, better than ten, with a kind south westerly wind. More too than the minus nineteen degrees in parts of Canada. Imagine.

‘It’s not raining,’ Rupert’s Mum reminds me. We’ve mostly had enough of rain. It’s unspoken, of course, because ecologically, East Anglia is always short of rain, but for the last month, our ground has been muddy, our buckets have been full and our clothes soaked. It is also always damp.

This morning’s sea is strong and pewter. Calm but for deep-cut wind-blown ridges and the periodic head-height wave that’s gentle when you see it coming but a morning wake up when you don’t.

I go into the sea sideways so that I don’t get knocked over. Sideways and sideways and soon, one of the waves which I’m cleverly avoiding bounces to my waist height. Once your..er..waist height has been thoroughly soaked, you may as well submerge the rest of you.

I make a kind of whale-cry (I’m still trying the vagus nerve sound stimulation as a distraction from the cold). The others have learned to ignore me.

It feels cold. Not yet spikily, bitingly cold but a thoroughly cold-water plunge. The water temperature is 14.7 degrees, a degree lower than last week and a further degree lower than the week before. There is a sea water temperature chart online. The summer temperatures look wave-like – a little up, a little down. Today’s sea temperature is the bottom mark on a continuous drop with a further fall forecast for November.

The sea is beautiful and restorative but I don’t stay in for long. Enough cold water therapy for today.

There are cormorants fishing and one drying himself on the old rig, wings spread wide, majestic. The first I’ve seen this year.

[Remember the cold mornings? I’m away from the sea at the moment]