Beach brew
Brean Down, Bristol Channel
Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.
Moby-Dick, Chapter 1: Loomings
We slosh, slack waterly, through floods and storms, to the guttering year’s end. The pilot light in our eyes sputtering. No tallow nor taper. No Argand lamp nor rush wick to hand. But what to do? What to do? I stomp and roll in embering gloom. The answer, of course, is in the trusty book. Chapter one. Paragraph one. To the sea!
To Brean Down, in fact. We billow blusterly down the motorway. In town, we slalom through shuttered holiday parks, wiggly-tin caravanserais, breeze block conveniences, unfired arcades, and dune-faced men in bus stops. Beyond this veil, just out of sight, breaks the broad unyielding sand. Crack the window and we can smell it.
The car rolls down onto the beach in thrilling transgression. Tyres raunch and scraunch over seaweed on trackless strand. Parked up, I sand-wedge the trangia to boil water. Hunched in that wind, a spark is relit. The flame roars. In minutes, I have a coffee in hand, salt spray in my hair, and all the wild, white-horsed sea is before us.
