A Walking the Land, First Friday Walk, February 2021
“Prompt: A sense of space is the sixth sense, an internal compass and map made by memory and spatial awareness together.”
Wardie Bay, Granton, Edinburgh
Written during the Covid pandemic.
Four times a day, every 6 hours (and 12.5 minutes) the tide turns. The strand is wide, wider, narrow, narrower, all day, all night. In and out, there and back, the sea gives us more space and then takes it away. Although I recognise it when I get there, I never know how it will be in advance - I just don’t seem to have that sort of a memory. The mixture of wind direction and wave pattern, the variation of bathers and dogwalkers, the height of the rock, the breakwater and island, means there are endless combinations. I can’t forsee, forfeel, or foretell how it will be.
Women swim, men sprint, kids throw balls. The links, a scrub of sparse green, is barely wide enough to play boules, never mind golf. I kick sand and smell the dispersed saltiness, I dally at the charred-black logs which leave my fingertips blackened. Groups used to picnic and paddle, light fires and let off fireworks, before the Great Crisis. Now we are old and young, fit and disabled, lazy, nosy and seeking - but mostly alone or, at the most, in ‘households’. The harbour wall gives shelter of sorts, is good for climbing and fishing. I go there a lot, or hardly at all, depending on my mood and when I’m not writing. I can see it from where I live whenever I want. Perhaps I looked at it 240 times last week - maybe I should keep count, press one of those little buttons that I used to see the woman at the door of the Portrait gallery use to register vistiors.
From the north-facing window
The beach accommodates the water, it accepts being covered and it allows exposure. Does it have a choice? It maintains its composure, doesn’t scream and shout. I hear no complaints. I watch carefully, but it lies there and waits, manages wetness and sun, is run on and dug in, its shape changed at will.
Sometimes it’s full of starfish, especially after a storm, often rubbish, rarely dog poo thank goodness. Recently it was crusted white, almost-frozen, and my footsteps didn’t look the same as they do in the beige sand. The sunshine makes the shiny residue of sea glitter and the hail causes millions, probably billions of tiny dents on its surface like after acne but more fleeting.
How is there a sense of place in a space which shape-shifts? Although it is enclosed by hard borders which remain static - road, breakwater, wall – the strand itself is not the same today as it was yesterday. It resembles itself as it was at dawn, when the long winter light reached between the high rises at Newhaven, but now the sun is setting: first over Heron Place then Hesperus Broadway and beyond. The Evening Star rises above my beach and picks out the facets of rock and glinting seaweed, and me.
I stand in the liminal space, not dry, not drowned, and move through tai chi. I encircle my arms, contain spheres of air for a second, then let the wind blow them into the sky, invisible balloons. I balance and shift, turn to north - to east - to west - grasp only to drop, tracing infinity signs which may remain for all I know. Sometimes the breeze whistles me and sometimes the sun warms.
I shut my eyes and don’t fall over; I am anchored on moving grains. It’s only the top layer of the ground which sinks as I step onto it, and when I return to that spot seconds later, it’s as if it hadn’t happened. Yet I know it did. I see no trace of myself, though I bet there are small creatures who have my scent, perhaps even miniscule deaths which I have caused. (Can one death be smaller than another?) If I ask, ‘Was I there?’ no one answers, however the sensation of recognition inside me, in my cellular memory, tells me I was. And I am further solidified by this thought - for a moment. If I must I rely on my own knowing then no-one can dispute what was. It belongs, I belong, to me.
After the storm
Was I there?
I know Inchkeith island (50m at its highest point) is there too, all of it, even though more than eight ninths is submerged in the Forth. I know this because usually I can see it its top and the books say so. Even so, I like when it has disappeared like it has today, when all that remains is the red lighthouse flash then nothing. The maps and my photos show it, I know it existed yesterday, and every other tomorrow it was back again so I trust it will be another time too, that it’s just hiding, that everything will go back to normal.
Hidden Island, Inchkeith, Firth of Forth
Before I start my Tai chi, I orientate, pointing my inner compass north. I locate my internal magnetometer between the acupressure points we call Ming men at the back of the waist, and Qi hai under my bellybutton - the Gate of Life and the Sea of Ki. I point my Sea of Ki to the North Sea estuary, and when I close my eyes I still know where I am. I am so familiar with the sequence. I have practised it in Spain, Austria and Croatia, in Kent as well as Scotland, in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep and before the light begins on a mountain top. Once I have set it, before I begin, I can sense where front is even with my eyes shut. I can hear the sea in one or other ear as I turn, feel today’s breeze on my shoulders or my knees as I gradually rotate right and left, can locate the traffic there where it always is. I remain upright, between heaven and earth.
It seems as if we are all here on the beach, our whole community, during the Great Isolation. Phase three of the virus of the second decade of the twenty first century allows walks and exercise in fresh air if taken in pairs or fewer. I am alone; separate from, yet with this community. They laugh and chatter, jump and cavort, shiver in their skin, and shake their fur with an urgency, scattering droplets in arcs.
Did you know that Inchkeith once housed people diagnosed with grandgore? It was these syphillis sufferers’ compulsory place of retirement, and more often than not they stayed there until they died. I do hope they had each other. Later, plague victims were quarantined on the island if they weren’t in their booths on the Links. We, now, must stay in our houses, unless we are rash enough to fly, then we must stay in a hotel and be monitored. I am pleased to be free.
(Almost) vanishing point
How does all this create and contain a sense of place? There is more to it than this, more to know about. Perhaps it is the enquiry itself which establishes me, locates me. I am not only engrossed, but more OF it, simultaneously after trying. This connection is private (now shared!), half expressed. I am now my own theme running through it.
You might also like this Sunday Feature on BBC radio 3