Wet without swimming

27th September

Autumn raged in, throwing bucketfuls of water at the windows and shaking the trees so hard that some leaves turned yellow and just a few fell off.

Not many yet. No abscission (one of my favorite words). We blame the wet first half of the year, the trees took in enough water to hold their leaves tight. Can we face hearing any more about the wet first half of the year? Now the worry (as if we need more worry) is the wet that’s pouring into this half of the year and the risk of flooding and the sharp drop in temperature. Doubtless roads will be flooded and trains will stop and we will live in damp misery until Easter, at least.

The answer, in my humble opinion (and I appreciate that food is well beyond the remit of this particular blog) is malt loaf. Affordable, vegan, low cal, now comes ready sliced (no need to gum up the kitchen sponge cleaning the knife). Eat it straight from the packet. Cheaper cheer than putting the heating on.

Back to the sea. Forward to the sea. Ten degrees on the beach, drizzle and a fresh wind from the north west. The flag was straight out fresh. The west country is bearing the worst of the rain. In East Anglia we’re getting off lightly. Lightly enough to drop big puddles and wash the roads but the water is so far sufficiently thin to run away rather than wait in great drifts.

This morning’s beach drizzle is enough to wash our faces and coat our clothes in damp and drips. Nothing worse.

The deep grey sea is huge. An hour after the first high tide, water holding a temperature of nearly eighteen, considerably warmer than the land.

It looks benign. A still grey pond under an opaque blue sky. There’s a bit of a wave crash at the edge of course, only to be expected with a deep sea. Nothing particularly remarkable until you look some more and spot a slow-moving wave like a ripple approaching the beach, as if someone has rucked up an expensive pewter rug.

The wave, who knows who first made it? Perhaps it came from a storm in the north of Scotland, perhaps Iceland? It travels slowly and deliberately with the north westerly, heading towards the beach under the skin of the sea, a sly sea monster, breathing gently, until it arrives in full magnificence, the height of a high-sided lorry, sometimes with its own white frilly breaker on the top. It falls just feet from the beach and pulls back with the strength of very many lorries.

Puck swam and got out unscathed. The rest of us watched. Watched the waves rise and fall in slow sequence again and again. It’s not hard to swim on a large wave in a deep sea. In fact it can be lovely; lifted up, lifted down. The scary thing about these waves was the strength of the tidal pull back into the deep sea after they fell.

It was as if the whole North Sea was pulling away from the beach. Swim, time your exit from the sea wrong and it would have been impossible to pull against it and you could have found yourself under a heavy weight crash, being turned and turned again under a retreating wave with a weight and heft that would have made it very hard for anyone to pull you out.

The drizzle made a mist that stole the horizon. We watched and got wet faces and damp kit from casually expectant swimming bags. Wet without swimming.

I tried and tried again to get a meaningful picture of one of the close huge waves but they hid from me. Hid and sniggered, sending a skinny run-off to soak my shoes and my socks.

The sky was empty. There were a couple of young gulls riding the sea.

It’s Professor Peru’s palindromic birthday. We share a very clever cake.

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