The sea has always played a substantial part in the living of my life. As a young child there was no more satisfying way of escaping the grime of an industrial city than to be taken to the seaside.
I suppose that's true of most children, but when I grew a little older I took to donning mask, flippers, and snorkel and spending long periods watching the crabs and flatfish flapping and scuttling along the sea bed on their way to heaven knows where. Occasionally I would swim around a rocky headland if there was one in evidence, and find a sea cave in which to sit until I became too cold and headed back to the sunlight and the shore. During the four years in which we went on holiday to Devon I spent every evening fishing from the breakwater at Brixham. When I took my first holiday without my parents I got swept out to sea by an unfriendly current and it took all the strength and determination of a fit and strong 15-year-old to make it back to the beach. I could sit for hours on a sea cliff somewhere, watching ships of all kinds making their anonymous way into or out of the western approaches (and what a thrilling sense those two simple words evoke.) At the tender age of 17 I was fortunate enough to cross the Atlantic in a Royal Navy frigate and experience first hand the power of a force 11 storm and the effect it had on a puny vessel. Much later I was again fortunate to live in a small cottage in a wild part of the Northumberland coast, a mere hundred yards from a beach fringed by sand dunes. I made a point of going to the shoreline every morning just to pay my respects to the spirit of the ocean. And that was the epilogue to my connection with the sea.
I calculated this evening that its thirty four years since I've seen the sea, and again I realised just how quickly time flies past you while you're busy observing life and trying to ascertain whether life is all there is.
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