I walk along the beach. Walk. Stroll. Amble. Meander. Bumble. Pootle. Potter. Wander. I’m not sure what the right word is. It isn't a trudge. It isn't a power walk. It isn’t a strident get-there-get-fit walk. It has no purpose. It is, I suppose, a meditation.
This is one of my happy places. I don’t stint myself when it comes to happy places. Quite the opposite: I actively hunt them out and try to pin them down on the page. A happy place is a finite thing, though it might not be a geographical space at all. It might be a mind-castle. It is simply a momentary realisation of what a miracle it is that I am here at all, that I exist, and even more so that I am here in a frame of mind capable of enjoying it –both the moment and the knowing that it (and I) might not be here tomorrow.
This particular ‘happy place’ beach, however, is an actual place and one that I return to again and again. It is a regular haunt: a familiar hunting ground. Cromer. At the waterline. On the ebb tide. That stretch of sodden sand that has not yet determined whether it has time to let go of all the water that it holds.
Liminality.
That is a favourite word, and a favourite thing.
I look at how the light shimmers on the surface of the sand and I do not wonder that the very ground I walk on is also a shifting space, uncertain.
Perhaps it doesn’t trust my step and wants the measure of me before agreeing to hold me. Perhaps it is asking how much faith I have in its ability to do so.
When I look back I see the footprints that have held, deep and light-catching, that may survive until the turning of the tide or the drying winds. When I look back I also see the footprints that immediately fill, first with water, then sand, then gravel: those that last no longer than a heartbeat or a breath of wind, vanishing.
I am photographing seaweed and collecting pebbles. It is a Tuesday morning in March. The sea is rippled silk, the precise colour of an evening gown that I have never worn.
The weather forecast said rain, but – just briefly – all the clouds run away to sea, and we have an astonishment of electric blue. Strangers comment on umbrellas and jumpers. Even as we speak I can see the storm clouds gathering beneath my feet. Reflected sky: another of my favourite things.
Other favourite things: pebbles smoothed to roundness, ovaloid, and how they are more beautiful when wet; the “mountain ranges” of sand left by retreating waves; susurration; the colour pink – especially as worn by the young girl who needed both wellington boots and a sun-hat; the tendency of humans to go down to the waterline; how small we are and how we cannot deny it when we face the sea; and all the memories of my Dad that crowd in on the word, and the sight, and the sound, and the scent, of the sea.
It’s because of my Dad that I have been reading about the search for a cure for scurvy, and about how many thousands died while it firstly eluded the scientists and later was disregarded by the admiralty. I think about drowned mariners – and cocklepickers – and refugees. I think about burials at sea, and the living lost or abandoned there. I wonder how many bodies our oceans hold and for how long. When all that is left of a life is the bones, there is nothing to hold them one to another and the waters will separate them. The bones will be tossed and tumbled and ground away to become beach sand somewhere: somewhere where no-one wonders whose grave they walk upon.
I think of swimmers, and children swept away on plastic dinghies, fast currents and turning tides. I spare a thought for the families who go home from a holiday, incomplete.
And I claim this as a happy place?
I do. Grim thoughts notwithstanding. They are just thoughts. Insubstantial as passing clouds and reflected sunlight. In the grand scheme of things, so am I. Finite and transient. Sooner rather than later I will be not just ‘gone’ but also ‘forgotten’. I too will be returned to the sea, to sink or to wash up somewhere unexpected, or maybe both. The land moves and shifts. Ultimately we all return to the water, and all water returns to the sea, sooner or later, by a direct route or a circuitous one.
I watch a container ship plough a dark furrow along the horizon. Too far out to hear, close enough for a sense of its speed. It is pulled along on some invisible thread, reeling it westwards. Then, I guess, it will shift to the north, towards Rotterdam or Bremerhaven. I wonder, for all of five seconds, what it might be carrying. I’m much more interested in the oystercatchers digging in the sand pool: red legs and black backs and half an eye on how close I might be getting.
I try to count the colours of the sea, looking in vain for one that I might call blue. Instead, I find grey, eau-de-nil, gunmetal, verdigris, lead, sludge, silver, pewter. Elementally, I am water, in both the main horoscopic traditions. Is there a thirst or hunger for something missing, that has me describing my element mostly in alien shades of metal?
The beach is largely empty this morning and so I claim ownership. I claim the shadows and the light and the pocketful of pebbles. I gift to the waters the fallen fence post that has left a gap and a string of warning notices on the cliff top, and that now lies on the beach, crawling its way out to sea, dragging its concrete footing with it. I give to the sands the fallen limb of some unnamed tree, splintered and fractured and ceremonially draped in bladderwrack. I claim for myself the light and the lullaby of waves; I claim the cloudscape and the gull screech.
I claim this mad March morning of doing nothing very much. I claim my miraculous ability to not care about all the other things I might have done instead – all the places I could have gone – all the people I could have seen – the classes I might have taken – the books unread or unwritten. I do not merely acknowledge the finitude of my life – the finite nature of it that means every choice I make shuts down all the options I didn’t take – I do not merely acknowledge it, I claim it. I celebrate it. If we really could have everything, then nothing would have value or meaning.
Today, for me, this is important: I walk on the beach and scavenge delights. Then I sit in my beach hut, watching the waters and eating two-day-old salad, and realise how unbelievably lucky I am.
There is a Spanish proverb that teaches us that life may be short, but it is broad. We do not get to choose the length of our lives, but breadth and depth…yes, those, I believe, are ours for the making.
