The plan, such as it was, fitted on the back of a train ticket: walk north along the shore for a week, stop when the light goes, write something down before sleeping. No word counts, no destination worth the name. Just a coastline and the habit of paying attention to it.
I have done this kind of thing before and failed at it in the usual way. The notebook comes along; the notebook stays in the bag. This time I made one rule, and it was a small one. Every evening, whatever the weather, one page. Not a good page. A page.
The first morning was grey in the way that coasts are grey, which is to say in about forty different ways at once. The water was the colour of slate where it was deep and the colour of tea where it ran over the sand. The sky did not commit to anything. A dog ran in wide circles on the beach for reasons of its own, and its owner stood at the edge of the dunes with the patient look of someone who has given up asking why.
What a shoreline asks of you
Walking along water is different from walking inland. There is no view to reach, because the view is already there, on your left, the whole time. What changes is small: the angle of the waves, a line of weed, a shell that is not like the others. You start to notice the difference between one stretch of sand and the next, and then you start to notice yourself noticing, which is the beginning of writing.
By the afternoon my boots were wet and my page was mostly a list. Rope, blue. Gull, standing on one leg, unbothered. A boat called Margaret pulled up above the tide line, its paint gone soft. It was not much. But it was a page, and I had written it, and that was the whole of the rule.
This is part I of Along the coast, a series of notes from a week spent walking a stretch of shoreline. Continue with part II.