Driftwood

The sun is shining today, after a day of almost cataclysmic downpours and gales and huge waves yesterday. I have been for an early morning walk, marvelling at the pure clarity of the light and the iridescent rippling of the stilled sea. It seemed quite miraculous that such storms could be followed so quickly by such calmness – the embodiment of the cliché, perhaps; the very thing that makes the cliché true.

Pausing beside a small beach, I stopped to look at just how much seaweed the huge storm-driven breakers had deposited on the sand. Instead of looking like storm debris, I realised, it actually looked oddly beautiful, as the sunlight glistened on the salt-strewn surface of the seaweed. It wasn’t a damaged version of something which should look beautiful, as I had first thought. Instead, it was something made more beautiful because of what had happened. After all, an autumn storm is an incredibly powerful thing, for all that it may be less pleasant to be outside on a stormy day than in the sunshine. The power of the waves, the wind, the rain, the hail – all that is overwhelming in its own way. It might not be pleasant, but it’s impressive to find yourself struggling to stay upright on your feet because of the immense energy of a stormy day by the sea.

The calm after the storm is more beautiful because the storm is still present in the memory. And that memory is personified by the shifted sands, the driftwood, the seaweed-strewn beaches, the windfalls and the random heaps of golden leaves. The light making the water shimmer with an aquamarine glow this morning is so very pure because yesterday brought barely any daylight at all, with lumbering, rumbling leaden clouds rolling past all day. Today the outlines of things look clear, sharp, redefined. I’m noticing things as though I’d never seen them before: the reds and blues and yellows in the newly repainted playpark, the black sheen of the scavenging rooks, the ice-cream colours of the painted seafront houses. Islands and headlands which are miles away look oddly close, their contours so defined that they seem touchable – knowable. Half Term families are re-emerging from their holiday homes, their coats and scarves and woolly hats and boots in colourful relief against the sand, their voices mingling with the cries of the wheeling seagulls overhead…

And it’s a metaphor, too. Thomas Hardy would have had a field day – or perhaps lacking a field to have his day in, a day at the beach. A Stonehenge made of sand and symbolism, with all the tragic impact of a constructed thing so easy for the waves to carry away.

Because sometimes you have days when the storms are so vicious that you can barely stand. When you barely know where to turn because the harshness seems to be on every side. Some days, there seems to be no daylight: just greyness coming leaden out of darkness as you wake, and slipping back into darkness again at night. Some days, you can’t see anything: a solution, a colour, an instamatic flash of beauty, anywhere. Days come when the people you thought you could rely upon betray you too, and then the picture of grey bleakness is complete: you knew there were people you couldn’t trust, you knew there were things to fear, but on those days you feel that nothing, or nobody, is knowable and the clouds come across your skyline and seem to stick.

Days like this do damage. Sometimes that damage can never be undone. Sometimes the best you can do is repair things a bit – like putting filler and new paintwork on a deep crack in a wall, or pretending you’re ok, and smiling, when really you feel as though your spirit has been broken. Like tidying up an autumn landscape where the wind-strewn golden leaves have rotten to a musty brown. Sometimes you have to make your mind up to accept that actually, the broken version is all right, that it has a beauty of its own – like the skeletal outline of a winter tree re-angled in reaction to a northern blast.

It’s November now. The sand-rake of the summer months would never be allowed to leave all that driftwood and seaweed strewn across the sand. And yet these things lend the beach a depth of interest which is somewhere beyond beauty… the compelling imperfection of the seaside out of season. The tourists have gone – the ice cream vans are patrolling the housing developments in search of winter trade, and the bucket-and-spade shops are making a living with steaming take-away coffees and hot chocolates for shivering walkers. The winter seaside can be more beautiful than the usual summer perfection, some years, as the ice and snowflakes vein the edges of the sand with ghostly fingertips, and the winds straight from the Arctic bend the trees to their prevailing angle of compliance.

Today the outlines of things look clear, sharp, redefined. I’m noticing things as though I’d never seen them before: the harsh beauty you sometimes have to suffer a bit to see. The fact that the beach looks more beautiful a bit damaged and distressed. The windswept, pale and tired silhouettes which are possibly more interesting than the lineless and perfected magazine ideals of what you’re supposed to look like if you’re beautiful. The reality of life with difficult days and betrayed trusts and battered, bruised emotions is a beach covered in the driftwood and the debris of a November storm. The difficult thing is remembering, when the storms are making it hard for you to stand or see ahead, that the clear iridescence of the light which helps you understand these things will return to make the peace which seems so far away just now seem oddly close again. Touchable. Knowable.