Today it rained and the sky was grey and the water was grey and all of it was moving all the time, the water rippling, the air swelling, the clouds filling, the mountains dancing back and forth as the clouds fell back, pushed forward, fell back again. I swam in the morning, alone. The tide was higher than I’d ever seen, the jagged rocks that make the bay feel like a safe, if rugged, harbour almost completely submerged, only the sharp shark-tooth tips poking out. I had to walk through a raft of fallen beech leaves to get in. Our normal seaweed free avenue was inaccessible so I went in right at the top of the bay, knowing there was seaweed below, expecting a tentacle on my ankle any second. The water was steely, blue, shuffling in the wind, forming peaks and troughs, dimple’s and bumps and craters. When I got back, got dry, the hail came, bouncing off the window ledge, making the roof thunder.
After too much time focusing on our work, we both needed air; we went out, despite the threatening rain, went across the bridge to Barmouth and ate chips. We looked at the beach, all silver and beige, the boats tipped sideways on the sand as the tide had deposited them. On the way back across the the bridge we noticed the new boards, the old ones rotting brown, deeply furloughed. Beneath us oystercatchers squeaked like chew toys, and we craned down to see them, stared at the rippled sand banks, the circular pools of water left by the retreating tides. A crow tried to fly seaward, was held motionless then pushed back by the wind. He landed on a post on the bridge, shook his feathers. We squinted at a distant shape, tried to work out what it was. It took off, wings stretched wide; a heron gliding low over the sand.
Bonnie Radcliffe 