My wife and I decide to have a walk along the wide and endless beach at Alnmouth in Northumberland. In some senses the coast is a complex thing, a layering of histories and stories and memory that is hard to unravel without the aid of spreadsheets and highlighter pens. In another sense the coast is a simple thing: it is a walk by the sea.
I like the car park at Alnmouth; you drive down a long path and someone gets out of a hut where they are doing a word search (a handy metaphor for the lot of the writer. I’ll save it.) and you pay three pounds and you can stay all day. It’s one of those mornings when it’s hard to know what to wear and a glance at the people on the beach doesn’t help. There are people in shorts and vests and people in cagoules; there’s a topless bloke and a woman in a woolly hat. A cardigan hangs low; a pair of socks are pulled high. A headscarf decorates a head and an anorak defines a body. I’ve got my shorts on but my trousers are in the car boot; I elect to keep my shorts on. Spoiler: I regret this later. My wife is wearing a substantial coat. Neither of us have brought woolly hats because, dammit, it’s June and the woolly hats have been sent to the old shoebox in the wardrobe where they’ll live until the autumn. And no, we don’t keep our winter shoes in a hatbox.
Behind us, golfers are dividing time into holes. A gentle breeze murmurs to the branches. A golf trolley passes. I notice, not for the first time, that the days when everybody had a dog have long gone; everybody has four dogs. I don’t mind the idea of dogs in the abstract; dogs in poems or dogs in comedy films I can put up with. I guess it’s just that I don’t agree that dogs understand every word you say; I’ve tried them with The Waste Land and I can report they don’t get it. The beach is dogfull and, like the people, some have coats on and some do not.
We walk down to the beach. The sky is the colour of your old school protractor, the one that you inexplicably kept until your thirties. There’s a breeze that threatens to mock my shorts but, even though we’re close enough to the car for me to go and put my trousers on, I choose to ignore it. Somehow as we stroll we can tell that the tide is turning. And another thing: it’s getting chilly. The wind is getting up, stretching, deciding to go for a run.
The wind is colder than we thought it would be, or rather it’s colder than I thought it would be because my wife has got her big coat on. We walk away from the wind and we are propelled along like land yachts. It’s pleasant and I tell a passing quartet of dogs this but they don’t understand. The sea is wearing a bundle of yachts like fascinators. A man chases a kite down the sands like men have chased kites down the sands for many many years. He may as well chase a gull.
Occasionally the sand gives my bare calves a caning, which is a reminder that fairly soon we will have to turn round and face the music; the wind music. I say ‘We’ll turn around when we get to that family huddling behind that windbreak’ and my wife nods. We both think that the windbreak huddlers are further away than they actually are, and it’s soon time to turn.
Maybe every day you spend by the coast has a moment like this, when the weather impinges for good or ill. That sudden emptying of silence that thunder brings. The sun marching from behind a cloud. The mist that wants to get in your pocket. And now, here, the wind. We turn and the breeze rearranges the day, and my hair. I feel an even deeper shorts-regret. It’s cold; it’s late June and it shouldn’t be cold. We haven’t lived through lockdowns, through those times when the grandchildren couldn’t come in the house and so we had to do those drive-bys where we spoke through car windows and they gave me pictures and I gave them presents and I went back in the house and, as often as not, wept, to wander on a cold beach. In an unfair world, this seems pretty unfair. We should at least be warm, I say to myself; or maybe I say it aloud because my wife says ‘You what?’ and her words and mine are torn from our mouths and hurled down the coast towards Amble.
We walk into the wind like trainee mime artists. Sand animals appear and disappear, swirling and dancing. The clouds seem almost too heavy for the sky. ‘I bet you’re glad you put your shorts on’ my wife says and I raise a sarcastic thumb. The tide is definitely coming in, bringing the wind with it, or vice versa. Occasionally the wind gets so strong that I’m reminded of that bit in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy’s house spins like a comedy bow tie. I half expect to see that bloke in the bathtub whirl by. My legs wish I’d put my trousers on.
As suddenly as it started, the wind stops. My hair rattles with sand-dandruff. A kite collapses. I don’t have to raise my voice any more and I say ‘That was cold, wasn’t it?’ My wife nods. We carry on walking, relieved that we don’t have to lean into anything now. We talk about the café we are going to visit, about the possibilities of scones.
From out of nowhere the wind begins again. I find myself shivering. I put my mask on to protect my face. Come on, let’s find a café where they sell scones and they don’t sell gales.