A Taste for the Edge.

I still wonder about that innate sense of fascination which we feel for the shoreline and the sea. The littoral environment; the interface between worlds; the fleeting connection with some unknown traveller bound for a distant land. Maybe it has something to do with the irresistible pull of boundaries.

When I was eighteen I was watching the TV one evening and there was a shot of the moon over the sea with its ever-shifting, fragmented image being reflected by the waves. Within two hours I was in my car heading for the island of Anglesey some eighty or so miles away, desperate to see the moon over the water. There was no moon that night and in the morning I drove home again, not via the coast road that time but through the mountains instead.

I don’t do that sort of thing any more. How age does wither our will and suffocate our taste for the lure of impulse. But I still occasionally recall one of my favourite lines from Dylan’s Gates of Eden:

Upon the beach where hound dogs bay

At ships with tattooed sails