I stayed with a friend last night in Snape and had one of those strange nights that I’ve been having off and on for years. To be awake at night is to inhabit a different world. One where normally you’re alone. Yet magic happens at night.
At this time of year I want to be out under a canopy of stars. No tent. Just a sleeping bag and the cosmos swirling above me. Thinking back on it, I can only remember doing this once before – with a family I’d never met before – the son was at school with my brother. They gave me a lift up to Scotland one August. We all lay in a row in our sleeping bags on the Yorkshire Moors and I lost count of the shooting stars we saw before I fell asleep.
I was going to do it yesterday but something interfered with my mood and I decided company would be a better option. I was asleep before 12 – great – but then woke at 2.30. By 3 O’Clock I started to realise I might not get back to sleep. At 3.45 it was getting light. The stars were disappearing quickly unable to keep their fires alight in the greying sky.
Outside my window a muntjac passed slowly, deliberately across the gravel of the drive stopping after each little step, aware of me somehow, but not. It looked like a woodcut figure. Its face turned towards me searching for me in the gloom. As it passed under the trees 2 white flashes, one from its leg and the next from its breast hit my retina like the quick 1,2 of a lighthouse light. Then it disappeared into the gloom. 5 minutes later the light was as as clear as daylight. I had seen night turn to day in minutes. It was like a slow dimmer switch being turned on.
After that I got up, got dressed, made the bed but then couldn’t get out. The whole house was locked without a key in sight. Reluctantly I returned to bed and eventually went back to sleep.
I was grateful when I woke up. The extra sleep had given me more strength.
Thursday had been stiflingly hot, oven door open hot. It was there smothering everyone and everything and all the time a tension, an expectation palpable in the air.
The next morning it was closer and then it broke. Warm water falling suddenly, hissing as it hit the earth, suddenly faster, heavier, louder. As quickly as it had started it stopped.
My 13 year old Godson, George, made me one of the best bacon and poached egg sandwiches I’ve ever had. I can see him now in his spotty dressing gown carefully swirling the water before dropping the egg in.
I drove off as the storm was passing. This far East will often miss the weather front that will affect the rest of the Suffolk area. The A12 was slick black from the rain.
Parking near the church at Walberswick, there was a real hush. The calm after the storm. The tension gone. No one out and just the heavy, lazy dripping of water from trees and bushes. These moments are like gifts.
My sleep deprived mind seems to absorb the landscape in a new way. I cock my head like a dog looking at clouds and light and curves in the landscape. It’s almost hallucinatory. I might look like a lunatic but I don’t care.
I am reminded of the excellent book that I’m reading at the moment. It’s Adam Nicolson’s bold account of the year (1797) when Coleridge and Wordsworth lived in the Quantocks and wrote some of their finest poetry. I love this description of the poet’s’ relationship with their landscape:
‘The full life was not the enjoyment of a view, nor any kind of elegant gazing at a landscape, let alone sitting reading, but a kind of embodiment, plunging in, a full absorption in the encompassing world’
Last year I tried an experiment when I forced myself to swim over a kilometre in Kalymnos. Deep strokes out to sea with little thought. Trying to think in a different way. Slowing down.
I did it again at Thorpeness a few weeks later. I was aiming for a buoy a long way out at sea. I can’t remember how far I got or how long it took. I was absent. It might have been a couple of hours. But I was also absorbed in that environment and afterwards I felt somehow blessed. A family on the beach were alarmed when I finally got back and I didn’t know what to say in response to them saying they were worried. I think I said something like ‘it’s like Ben Stokes in his last wicket stand against Australia at Headingley’ (in 2019), trying in vain to express something about the ability to get into ‘the zone’.
I am heading south to the point where I left off. The cut through to the beach. Half the sky is stained still with the remainder of the storm while a hazy blue slowly fills the rest of the sky in the West. The sun is not out but is a pale yellow presence behind the bank of cloud.
The haze is heavy, getting warmer. I follow the path along the river, wet grass slides against my legs. A man with a pink baseball cap and a very friendly Staffie bull terrier is catching up on me. Whenever this happens I pause and wait for them to pass. As soon as he gets close I recognise him. I have a strangely acute memory for faces and he asks me exactly the same question he did last year ‘Do you know where you are?’ I am looking at my phone and say I’m fine and that I’m just taking a photo.
I like that he is offering help but a prouder person might feel like ‘Hey, I don’t need your help’. This thought rises very briefly and I dismiss it immediately and appreciate his offer.
The path is now on the marshes with the solitary windmill a red beacon against the flatness.
Suddenly, there are lots of people. A good looking family, all blonde and happy on bikes with cheery faces and hellos. A red faced man with binoculars who offers a cursory ‘morning’ while looking across the marshes. Another family, quiet, 2 very tall sons with long hair and the baggiest trousers I’ve ever seen. They look like their legs might suddenly blow up and they’ll drift upside down across the marshes.
And here is the cut through. Yes. Back to where I started, however prosaic it might seem it always gives me a glow. The brutal consistency of a Suffolk beach backed by the North Sea
I’m feeling the heavy head and sore eyes that come with lack of sleep as I crunch up the beach. The haze is still above me, the sun seeming to strain itself to burn off the cloud but still a white smudge behind the veil. Yet, turning my gaze to the sea, little silvery flickers are appearing on the surface exaggerated by the darkness of the surface and the sky behind.
I’ve read too many stories by twelve year olds that say something like the sun reflected off the sea like a million sparkling diamonds but as the sun starts to get stronger and I look for miles across the glitter towards the horizon I can think of no better way to describe what I’m seeing. The sparkle is like that of gems constantly blinking sending lines of light into my tired eyes in the way it seems only diamonds can.
I have that urge as I have so many hundreds of times before to be out there amongst it in the pull and the rise and the drift. There’s never any hesitation. Once I’m committed there is no going back. Again the fatigue distorts my sense of time and space and I’m suddenly out 100-150 metres, then flat on my back my eyes closed listening to the lapping in my ears.
I am imagining a castaway film. Robinson Crusoe. Or something similar. The man shipwrecked and unconscious at sea bobbing about after the storm just off the coast of a desert island about to wake up and discover his new terrain, the new life of survival and hardship that awaits him.
Alas – or not – when I open my eyes it’s still only the shingle, sand and marshland of Walberswick.
Northwards I continue (as always). North to the end of this particular journey. When will I get to Lowestoft? Will it be this Summer? I expect so.
Walberswick itself starts to present itself as a thin black line sticking out to sea. This is a line of steps that mark all that’s left of the once grand Walberswick Pier. Colourful objects and people start to come into focus. The archetypal British seaside scene: toddlers in orange armbands, sandcastles and dams, a multi-coloured lined windbreak up in the dunes. It’s good to see. People have been locked down for so long. What better escape than the beach and the sea?
I follow the beach to the pier heads which seem to follow the river like a riverbank as it empties into the sea.
I now have only one choice and that is to follow the river inland towards the village. I cross Wally’s Bridge lined with families crabbing. I don’t realise how fitting this is til later when I discover that the bridge is named after Keith ‘Wally’ Webb, co-founder of the British Open Crabbing Championship, held in Walberswick every year between 1981 and 2010. Everyone is out at play. It couldn’t be more different than the seemingly empty world I arrived at after the storm this morning.
The Slow Walker 