On Sunday I was so tired I didn’t think I had the energy for anything, but I still dragged myself to the sea. The wind was high and the waves were rushing in, bands of white flushing forward to the shore. I walked out along the concrete wall of the tidal pool, which was thick with weed like mermaids hair, a hundred tiny strands matted together into a lime green carpet. The water in the pool rippled, criss crossed into diamonds and grids by the wind. A brown fronded seaweed lay lace like beneath the surface, and the pools walls were thick with leathery black-green fronds. There are so many different kinds of seaweed that I don’t feel like I will ever know them, but I knew there were species of each variety – red, brown and green – just in one small square of the wall.
I went into the water, milky and blue, and I swam from steps to steps. The wind smacked waves into my face, slapping against my collar bone till I had to swim with eyes shut against the spray. I went to the far wall, where the incoming waves were pouring over the boundary, fireworking white into the air.
I climbed three rungs of the metal ladder and clung on to watch the waves smack in – a surge, a spray, then a drawing back, clear water running out, inches thick, over steadfast limpets and pimpled concrete. I felt a nettle like sting at my ankle, a jellyfish I couldn’t even see. I climbed out and stood in the wind until I knew I should get dry. I swam back, the water both warm and cold on re-immersion, dressed and walked along the shore.
There were gobbets of bright pink seaweed, and lines, lines everywhere, in the walls of the pool, the bands of the sea, the outgoing tide marks on the sand. A cluster of tiny shadows fluttered over me and I looked up to see five tiny dark birds, flying too fast ti be identified.
Bonnie Radcliffe 