SEA SPAM

(A postcard from my holidays...)

 

For weeks, now, throughout the summer, you’ve been posting photos on social media under the heading ‘sea spam’.  You’ve taken breaks from this a few times during the year, but have got the impression that some people quite like seeing the photos- so you keep sharing them. Photos seldom show the person framing the shot, but reading into the pictures may hint at their back story. 

 

‘Why do you always take that photo at the same point?’ he asks, as you stop on the clifftops or at the end of the beach or at the very end of the South Pier.  ‘Wouldn’t it be better to take different photos, at different points, on different days?  More interesting for all those people on Twitter or wherever?’

 

He has a point.  There are so many stunningly beautiful views, where you live, that, really, you should find something different to photograph every day.  And sometimes you do.  There was that day you visited a forest park about 25 miles away, and you took lots of photos of that (branching out into ‘tree spam’).  There are days when you’ve walked along the beach instead of the cliff paths, taking photos of the meeting of land and water, the crashing or lapping waves and the horizons of colour- gold to bronze to white to azure to blue.  There have been trips to the Giant’s Causeway and shots of the towering cliffs and famous stones (‘stone spam’). You've gone both east and west along the coast, to other towns and villages. But more often than not, you default to the same walk (about 4 miles around the main landmarks of your seaside town, including the cliff path across the headland) and the same photographs. 

 

‘Every day is different,’ you explain.  ‘It’s what I’ve noticed about living here.  It might be the same walk, but it hardly ever feels the same.  The light changes.  The weather changes.  How many people are around changes everything too.’  Even as you say it, you know it sounds pretentious.  You know he’s going to think that you’re like a dog marking its territory, posting on social media so others will identify you; maybe even notice you. 

 

‘I suppose it’s like Monet with his haybales or Rouen Cathedral or those endless waterlilies,’ he sighs, ‘different in every light…’

 

And you suppose it is. Where you live, the seascape and the sky are expansive.  You notice weather so much more than you did anywhere else you’ve ever lived:  squalls or sea mist or those north-east winds that chill you to your bones, blowing in across the sea; shimmering July heatwaves or Easter blizzards or those amazingly frequent winter hailstorms.  The light is amazing:  you wish you could paint, but the nearest you can get is taking endless photographs.  You’ve attempted to do justice to numerous stunning sunsets (no two the same) and a few heart-lifting sunrises (when insomnia strikes).  You share them, if you think they’re worthy of it:  spam, and more spam.

 

But all these changes are not just a trick of the light.

 

When you live in a seaside town which the rest of your region chooses as a holiday destination, the entire dynamic of the place changes with the seasons.  When you’ve been a resident for many years, you start to resent the influx: you pick up the local habit of calling the visitors ‘the chip-eaters’- even if, secretly, every time, this feels like a decidedly unromantic version of Tennyson’s poem The Lotos Eaters.  In a summer when ‘staycations’ have become the norm, you feel as though you’re actually on holiday, although at home, as you join the thousands who cram the local beach with their day-long encampments:  pop-up tents, windbreaks, limitless picnic rations in a series of coolboxes, boards and small water-craft, and everything carried in a pull-along cart.  When you photographed the same beach, in the winter, it was so utterly deserted that an old friend commented that she felt sure you were the area’s only resident.  Now, in a record-breaking heatwave, there are people everywhere: the area is thronged with shiny 4x4s disgorging excited families and lovestruck couples.  Shorts are de rigueur.  Everyone seems to want to learn to use a stand-up paddleboard: the sound of Summer 2021 is the sudden, distinctive, gush of air from a pump into an inflatable board or kayak.  You get swept into a craze, and find yourself trying sea swimming:  you’ve read about the benefits, several of your colleagues love it, and everyone else seems to be disrobing and taking to the waves, so… surely it can’t be that cold?  It can: it is.  The first few times, you have to stagger ashore when you lose contact with everything below your knees, after what would equate to a few lengths of a standard pool.  You learn to swim on, while buffeted by waves which tower and threaten to engulf you.  You negotiate small children and small craft; you wear your first few jellyfish stings like a badge of honour.  But most of all, you get stared at, because you’re actually swimming in a stretch of water where the vast majority of people walk into the sea, waist-deep, and stand, like penguins, looking around and chatting.  You notice that teenagers have a different approach:  they fling themselves into the shallowest waves, taking turns to photograph each other, curse loudly when they feel just how cold it is, and leave.  You are especially amused at the lithe twenty-something who gets her boyfriend to photograph her in the water, as she drinks a takeaway coffee while wearing a bikini, but she doesn’t go in beyond her knees.  Her hair and her perfect tan remain unthreatened throughout…

 

A seaside town changes with the tides.  It can, in winter, be impossibly windswept- as you lie awake at 4am, listening to rain and hailstones hammering against your bedroom window, you’re already dreading having to go outside.  In a summer heatwave, you find yourself closing the curtains and turning on fans in several rooms.  You might curse the ‘chip-eater’ tourists when you can’t find anywhere to park, but you secretly enjoy the life and colour they bring to the place.  Your repetitive photographs attempt to capture this.  Over the course of a year, your ‘sea spam’ ebbs and flows with sunshine or sea mist, stormy seas or flat calm, thunderclouds or beaches veined with snow.  The colourful beach-crowds come and go as the seasons change.  The deckchairs crowd the South Pier, then get put away for the winter.  The sunrises and sunsets get earlier and later: the patterns of the calendar unfold like the structure of a four-movement symphony…

 

You don't want to miss any of it.  And sometimes, the subtlest changes are the ones which make the greatest impact:  thick sea fog today where there was burning sunshine yesterday;  towering waves next week replacing this week’s flat calm;  ice in a few months’ time replacing summer holiday ice creams.  Different photos from different points on different days would undoubtedly be more interesting. But you see things changing and unfolding and developing from those same places: those same photos from the same points are, in the photo lens of your eyes, different every day.  You look at the sea differently when you’ve tried to swim in it a little.

 

The tides turn.  The light changes. The camera captures what you see as life goes on.