I have been thinking a lot about the sea lately for one reason or another. For the last half an  hour a little guillemot bird has been causing us concern. It is bobbing on the waves, and the sea is wild and there is a strong wind, and above him we see the herring gulls, circling in menacing circles. They swoop as one, and fight each other as they attempt to pluck him from the water, but he dives and evades them each time. It is awful. Why can’t he get to the shore and we can save him?  The gulls usually pluck starfish from the broiling sand as the waves recede, leaving the creatures exposed, and then attack each other to get possession of their trophy. But a guillemot? That seems so cruel.

We were in Wales a few weeks back visiting Natasha and family, and along the Penarth coastline, long ago, the Jurassic creatures were known to prowl.

On Hazel’s second birthday,

after an elegant afternoon tea which followed an intense ice skating lesson,

we meandered along the beach, down by the pier, picking up fossils and ammonites.

I could recognise the odd familiar shape, but for serious searching you need the eyes of Natasha. She can pull a four leaf clover out of a field with just a glance, so on a stone-strewn beach it was natural for her to find part of a tail of a plesiosaur which was later confirmed by the Cardiff museum’s palaeontologist. Just the day before our visit, Leo had a letter from the same department confirming his find which he had submitted as being the actual poo of an ichthyosaur, only 200 million years old.

I could make out limpet and mussel shells. I felt like that lady in the poem, seen from a train, walking through a field wearing gloves, missing so much and so much!

John and I have been tramping the paths by the surging sea, and revisiting the east coast pathways… you are on the right path if the sea is on your right.

Fields are brown with the earth newly turned, lonely benches invite you to take the weight off your feet for a minute, and buttery yellow sands give way to manicured golf courses, defying the vicious salt-laden winds.

Pale grasses grew thick and high by the sand dunes, and I had a flash of memory of the safari trip in Botswana when the same sort of grasses disguised the colours of the lions.

We are lucky that we can walk along with no fear, our eyes trained on wild orchids and the burgeoning colours of spring.

Village life has been inviting. We went as guests to the annual curling ceilidh, held in the Masonic rooms, where Robert Burns’s portrait,  in full mason’s apron and fancy get-up, stood beside that of Her Majesty. It was a fun evening, with a bit of dancing to the ceilidh band, whose members, all over seventy, could have jumped out of the pages of The Highland Games. John is now full of trepidation, as he was being urged to join ‘the curling’ next season. Can’t be that bad, a bit like ten pin bowling I would have thought!

Long ago when I was young (ha ha) I had a swain, a couple of years older who left for Australia and left me heartbroken. I think I was about fourteen. He wrote me poetry and letters over the years and became a doctor and then a psychiatrist, and made quite a name for himself in northern Queensland.

Well, he has written a book, which he sent me and I have been like an armchair traveller as I lived his ocean journeys on board his kayak as he paddled the Great Barrier Reef over the course of twenty years. I watched the lights twinkle from lonely lighthouses, sat on beaches where giant crocodiles slept among the mangroves, and felt the pain of his reminiscences of his father and some of his patients. I learnt of a new hero that influenced  so many boys growing up in Australia in the 1950s and 60s, Jack Idriess. I tried to buy his books (a very prolific writer) but these are now out of print and the only copies available can be bought at an extortionate price.

I had never really thought of the Coral Sea, or the Torres Strait but now I feel as though I know them as intimately as Captain Cook, hence my earlier reference to thinking about the sea, not just as a constant changing backdrop to my life but as a living moving force.

My old friend’s book is Vicarious Dreaming, by Ernest Hunter. I do hope it becomes available outside Australia:

But bad weather leaves no space for reflection, just attention – to balance, to the shifting centre of gravity as the kayak is overtaken by following swells, to remaining true to the compass bearing against the sea’s pull to port, to glimpses of low coast through the rain, to the slowness of time – elapsed time; it’s hours until the bauxite-reddened cliffs around Sharp Point appear between the squalls.

Here John knows a lot about gravity. He fell off a ladder on Monday and ended spread-eagled on the decking, with a deep gash on his ear and a very sore rib cage. He was quite stunned, and confused, but made a good recovery. Nurse Me, coped well and didn’t faint at the blood this time. I just was horrified at the swelling of his ear; it looked like a purple plastic toy that he had glued on. Fortunately he is well again, but has been banned from ladders for ever. He affects deafness at these announcements and talks about summer days when everything is sunny and DRY.

We went to see Local Heroat the Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh yesterday. It was wonderful: a brand new score by Mark Knoffler, with new songs added to the already haunting original melodies. The play more than made up from the dire Vegan lunch we had subjected ourselves to earlier. Oh God! Beetroot burgers held together with some wallpaper paste which tasted of very old oil. Mine was teriyaki tofu which tasted burnt and was as tough as old leather sandals. I am still shuddering and John is still cross that we had to pay for it. We left three quarters of it. ‘Did ye no like it?,’ asked the waiter. ‘Not really our thing,’ I said, politely. Why are we so polite? What a waste of money –  but not all was lost. Earlier in the day we had gambled on the Grand National, and like true amateurs, we put our money on the Favourite which won. Sadly we didn’t bet £100, but still, we walked away winners!  Then we went home and I made an omelette out of a goose egg; now that was something  worth eating… absolutely delicious!

Irene and Mike came for lunch last week, and she gave me a CD from the troubadour  that plays in all the pubs around Edinburgh and Fife. He is a Scottish Chinese chap called Andy Chung, and Irene and I have such happy memories of him strumming his guitar and making us cry to the tunes of Dark Lochnagar and the Fields of Athenry. Irene then got out her phone and playedThe Wild Geesesung by Jim Reid:

Oh tell what was on your road, ye roarin’ norian’ Wind,

As ye cam blawin’ frae the land that’s niver frae my mind?

My feet they traivel England, but I’m deein’ for the north.

My man, I heard the siller tides rin up the Firth o Forth.

 Far abin the Angus Straths I saw the Wild Geese Flee,

A lang, lang skein o beatin wings wi their heids toward the sea…

And finally, on Monday, I actually sat down and read my unfinished manuscript, The Fish in the Tree. I was mad when it came to an end… I just wanted it to go on – surely it must be a sign, I must get on and figure out what happens next!

But it’s the discipline of writing. How does a fierce writing programme fit in with looking after Darcey and Dillon, going to Pilates, going walking with John, sewing, reading the biography of Samuel Pepys (fantastic), and all the other distractions that come my way? Perhaps there is a time, or maybe it’s past. Have I have missed the boat or will it come again?

Ernest wrote half autobiography, half biography of Jack Idriess, and somehow linked it all to the sea. I shall finish with his thoughts:

Oceans warped by forces bent across time and space tightening their tidal embrace. Entwined with currents, driven by winds, checked and channelled by geography – its movements are different everywhere. And not – the sea comes in; it goes out. It’s the same with memory, the flow determined by intersections, coincidences and the submerged terrain of shame and denial. And like returning to familiar islands, recollections are always different, memory never revisits in precisely the same way. But like tides they go back and forward, back and forward – and back again.

 The book that I WILL finish (one day) may not be the same one that I previously started to write. My inner tides go in and out, and my memories do shift, but it sits inside me, and it wants to get out. I will just have to judge the time.