Having arrived in Cleethorpes, my wife and I go for a stroll along the tops and the sky, as it should be, is almost too wide for the sky. Boats that look like toys amble up and down the Humber and a scattering of oystercatchers face the slight breeze and let it minimally redesign their feathers. A man walks past and says to a woman, ‘I don’t know why you’re bothering, they’re not even close friends. They’re just friends.’ A masked woman trundles by on an electric scooter. If the speed of light was powered by a fully charged battery, she would be faster than the speed of light. She buzzes like a metal wasp and nods at me to acknowledge that she knows I know that she’s buzzing like a metal wasp. What she doesn’t know is that she’s about to buzz into a page of a book.
My mother-in-law is in the caravan getting a few ornaments out ready for the start of the season; like a kind of grammar or syntax, the act of getting out the artefacts reminds her where they go on the shelves, just as the act of getting the words out to put into a sentence reminds you where go they. Reminds you where they go. We walk to where the ice-cream man often is but isn’t there yet because of the pandemic and in my head I am rehearsing the taste of the first 99 of the season. The first of ninety-nine 99s one year, I hope. You can tell that I’m a bit giddy because spring is here or hereabouts.
I tell my wife, only half joking, that I can smell the pie. We begin to stroll back to the caravan. Now I really can smell the pie, or the anticipation of the pie. I’m an emotional man and as I walk I almost begin to well up; the winter has been so long and its grip has been so tight. The deaths have been relentless and the social distancing has become a habit of mind and there were times when it got so dark, metaphorically and really, at 4pm that I thought I’d never get to walk by this mud and that sea as flat as the last scene of a film you guessed the ending of. I thought that this book would be all memories, that the coast itself would just become an aspiration and an inspiration rather than somewhere I could get between my toes.
Back at the caravan many of the ornaments are in place but, more importantly, the pie is just about to come out of the oven and the peas are on the hob. ‘There’s a burnt bit of crust for you’ my mother-in-law says, and my happiness is almost complete. Maybe this is worth the dark winter. It’s an odd thing, and maybe a Yorkshire thing, this enjoying of the burnt bits. When I get to our local bakery and I ask if they’ve got any loaves with the crusts a bit burnt, I’m always too late. Other charry-aficionados have got there first.
The pie emerges. There’s a burnt segment like a black collar on a pale shirt. I am a happy man. The mushy peas have arrived from heaven. The gravy has the ability to make you into a better human being, or so it seems. We sit down to eat. Like a child at a party I save the best, the burnt bit, till last. It’s exquisite.
Then, even though I know I shouldn’t, I make the mistake of accepting a second portion of pie, this time without the singed bit because I’ve eaten all of that. Even as I munch I feel a yawn brewing at the back of my jaw. I’m aware that my eyes are starting to fail some kind of test. I get up very early every day; I usually wake up at about 4.30am feeling marvellous. I spring out of bed at 5am (having composed several lines of poetry in my head) and go for my early stroll. I get back in the house at 6.06 and do some exercises involving grunting and small weights. I still feel tiptop. This tiptoppery lasts until about 1pm and then, particularly if I’ve eaten loads like I just have, I start to slump. Gravity attacks my eyelids.
I can feel myself starting to go; I am a house of cards that is about to tumble. I am an argument that is about to be demolished by better debaters than me. That second plateful. I shouldn’t have had it! After the second helping, I’d made the tactical and probably strategic error of moving to the settee. I force myself vertical and sit on a hard seat at the dining table but I begin to list to one side; I am about to sink. I see my wife and mother-in-law exchange glances that seem to underline that I am more to be pitied than blamed. My wife often says that I should spend another hour in bed but then I’d miss out on lots of tiptoppery.
I decide to go back to the settee and rest my eyes for a moment. Just for a moment. I fall into a sleep so deep it is as though I have been mummified. I dream a vivid and knife-sharp dream about a visit to the caravan when my children were little and my younger daughter had a cough that worsened and worsened as the evening wore on until we had to take her to hospital in Grimsby. We stayed overnight and I slept beside her in a bed made of rocks. Before we went to sleep I told her stories about the places we’d go the next day; to the sands, to Mr Ben’s for ice cream, to the amusement place we called HillyBilly Moonshine, to the little train with its open carriages that let the weather sit beside you. And of course she got better the next day. In the spring of 2020 she got coronavirus and I remembered the croup and the overnight stay and I was scared. Luckily, after a few days she recovered. That hospital bed, though. That steel mattress.
Leave me here for a moment, will you, dreaming? It’ll soon be time to stroll by the water again.