YEARS WENT OVER AND NOBODY FOUND US

The man who passed me on a coastal path in Scotland and said ‘Who knows that the sea knows, eh?’ and carried on walking before I could reply, which was a good job because I couldn’t think of a reply. The boy who was standing on a bench near the beach at Cleethorpes doing magic tricks in front of a tiny audience and the wind blew his hat off but he carried on doing the tricks. The man who broke wind symphonically and deafeningly as he walked with his wife past some amusements in Filey and who, as his wife told him off in a hissing sibilant paragraph of rage, sang ‘Better out than in’ in a fine operatic tenor.

The man who asked me, as the sea battered Bridlington Harbour, if I’d seen his magnet. ‘It’s shaped like a magnet’ he said, not smiling. The woman sitting on a deckchair at Skegness who had fallen asleep so spectacularly that all her bones seemed to have deserted her; she was liquid. The man who chased a kite down a beach that is just that in my memory; a beach. He is distinctive and the kite is distinctive but the beach is a beach.

The family who stood around a jellyfish at the edge of Seahouses Harbour; they, and the jellyfish, were perfectly still and the jellyfish looked like a fallen planet and they could have been moons in shorts. The gull that came in through the open window of my hotel room in St Ives and sat on the end of my bed regarding me with an intelligence that seemed superior to mine; I lunged to cover up the complementary biscuit. The time my son threw a message in a bottle into the sea and it went out a little way and then came back in a few yards down the beach and a boy grabbed it and opened it and shouted excitedly to his dad ‘There’s somebody called Andrew who lives in Barnsley and who wants to write to somebody!’ and my son and I kept quiet and looked in the other direction but a letter never came.

The bus driver who shouted ‘The brakes are away!’ as the old coach rattled down to Tobermory Harbour; somehow it slowed down just before the water, unlike my heart. The posh family on a beach who said that they couldn’t possibly open the hamper until Mrs T arrived; I assumed she was a family friend but she was the servant. They applauded when she arrived and she opened the wicker door and solemnly gave out napkins. They sprayed each other with champagne but it was a genteel spray; one of them clicked their fingers at Mrs T and she passed them a clean napkin.

The man in the black suit who lay on the beach at Scarborough like he was on a funeral director’s away day; he was not dead, only sleeping, and a black dog lay at his feet. The words MAY MAY I LOVE YOU MAY on a beach in Wales, being eaten by the slow unsentimental tide. The man who shouted ‘Jump, Green Trousers!’ as I hesitated to leap from a pitching and rolling boat on to the island of Lundy; I was certainly wearing green trousers and my breakfast was tattooed on my jumper. The man who pointed at the T-shirt I was wearing on the sands one summer; I thought I was being clever and a bit subversive by getting the words JUGS OF SAND FOR THE TEA printed on it at one of those booths that seemed to be everywhere in those days. He carried on pointing and said, ‘That should be “jugs of tea for the sand” you know.’ I bit back a sharp retort and carried on walking, my irony flapping in the wind.

My children playing a game on the beach at New Quay in Wales; it involved me bringing them a note and then walking away and them saying ‘Years went over and nobody found us’; to this day, decades later, I still well up when I think about that moment. The man in tightly fitting shorts who ran past me at Bamburgh and shouted ‘Keep writing them poems’ and he was way past me before he could register my raised thumb and my nod of the head. The wicked grin on the face of the woman who was helping her children bury her husband in the sand; his comb-over was like seaweed in the sun and his smile was just this side of forced. Her smile was determined, as she piled on more sand than was strictly necessary. There was a story there that William Trevor or VS Pritchett could have written. In my fading memory of the event one of the children was called Rollo but maybe I made that up. My Uncle Jack trying to hypnotise me on the short ferry ride to Caldy Island in South Wales by swinging his watch in front of my face and saying ‘You’re leaving. You’re on your way. You’re leaving…’

My dad buying me a Cornish pasty in Bridlington that I didn’t really want because, although I’d never had one before, the nascent poet in me thought that the word ‘pasty’ rhymed with the word ‘nasty’ so it wouldn’t taste very nice so I dropped it in the harbour where it made a pasty/nasty splash and I told my dad what had happened and he bought me another one, which wasn’t the climax to my plan that I’d envisaged.

Shaking enough sand out of my shoes over the years to make at least one beach, with the tide way, way out. The sand spreads across the floor and across my memory. Maybe that’s what memory is: a tide that goes out and then comes in with things floating and swimming in it. Things to remember. Things to write down and keep forever. Years went over and nobody found us.