Low Tide, St Leonards, 15.27

Under, only sand.

To the west, the sun, golden and lowering. It is not fiery, more a burnished ball gently moving towards the sea. Here, the shingle extends for miles from east to west, at various points is called various names. Further east, the fishing fleet launches from the beach. I keep meaning to come and watch the small boats fling themselves at the mercy of the sea; but I am still at the mercy here of boxes and deadlines and there is no time for boats or to pick fish up from the fisherman’s huts lining the shore in the way I thought I would before the move. Life continues at the same pace it did, speeding towards publication of Ava Anna Ada. Recently my sleep has become littered with nightmares about it, how to manage children and promotion and research trips and all of it becomes worries that stack and creep at 3am, but not now, not with the sun this way and the children walking down to the edge of the sea, gently lapping white foam seahorses, hiding its true nature or showing a different side at least, and Avery is intrigued by the strange waves here, how they vary along the beach, the tide seeming almost to come in in different directions.

First time we have encountered the tide this low. A lucky accident. Rocks exposed now and filled still by the receding tide, with sea creatures, curious and novel, and the children peer in towards them and say they will bring nets next time and I will soon be a person with a tide app on their phone, obsessed with the pull of the moon, and the sun too, as Avery informs me, at the age of 9 already knowing more about tides than I do. With the sea rolled back as it is now, hard packed sand is exposed. The children marvel at this, watch worms making their casts. The rest of the beach is stone and shingle, the sand a surprise. The water, bright bright blue, the sand, near silver, the sun so low now it is hard to look west. The children run ahead, as if to be swallowed by it; I am made breathless now by it, the all of it again, just how beautiful it can be and it would be easy to be fooled by this into thinking of nature as motherly and bountiful and benign although I am working on an essay to the contrary but how nice it would be, just this once, to shake off my hard earned cynicism and become rhapsodic about the setting sun which of course I am doing, in this roundabout way as the children continue to run into it and for a split second there is only them, the sun, the beach. I like three ingredient things the best. Pull phone from pocket, a photograph, three more for good measures, for luck.

No birds in sight, still full likely from the mussels picked at high tide. We see them all along the tideline, cobalt shells decimated. The necessity of survival. Think of Louise Bourgeois as the children run ahead, of the chapter I am writing and not finishing, of the painting I am spending so long looking at that I often see it when I close my eyes in the same way the sun has now deposited black spots on my vision; a painting about survival and denial. I know about denial. And maybe too I know about survival. Not maybe, certainly. The summer I first began to eat myself. By winter, too weak to move. In this way I confined myself to my house, to essential trips to the doctor and to long drives with my grandmother. Beauty kept me alive that winter, much as it sounds trite and simple to say it, but it was the decay I found most beautiful then, the bare trees, the mulching leaves, the smell of damp in the air, the early morning frost, the trip wire my heart had become, the way I could see it beat an unpredictably rhythm in my chest. Crows picking carrion from the road, birds squabbling over berries as they would nest space in the spring, and in the woods, a worker from the papermill hanging himself to death, storms felling trees in unpredictable ways. Everything, just trying to survive in the same way I was, because it was essential, to become and continue cannibal to buy myself time, to understand my own materiality, even though it created many sicknesses, there was a logic I could not and cannot argue with in this self denial. Which I mean absolutely as it is stated there. Self denial. Denial of the fact of a self. A self I was terrified by, always veering as it did, resolutely to the bad when I was meant to be good. The only way to be good being denying the fact of my flesh. Mortified by and mortifying it. Estella shouts as she finds an oyster shell turning fossil, cleaved to the rock. Perhaps it is just stuck, but it is beginning to look petrified.

We look down the the oyster, determine the shell empty, prise the upper half of the shell away to take home. Estella’s coat, pocketless, she demands I put the shell in my own, and as the sun turns the clouds pink, I feel each side lying against my wool coat; one, contoured and rough, the other, smooth silk.

( missed a day because I have been unwell and in reality, these take a little bit longer than ten minutes to write, and work has been the priority. If anyone wants to commission an essay about nature’s darker side and why it’s largely neglected in nature writing (not all, don’t @ me), let me know. I recently described Ava Anna Ada as a kind of anti-nature writing fable at press thing, it’s a fable about how brutal it is, how much it doesn’t like us and afraid we are of our natures. Yes, I’m a big fan of Ted Hughes.)