Grandpa Joe, sandwich spread, and Fig sticky toffee pudding

Abundance: Tuesday 7 January 2025

I usually meet new year with the enthusiasm of a dog too long in the back of the car, but the first few days of January have had me slow, yearning to be Grandpa Joe, tucked up in bed, wooly bed-hat lolloping against the bedstead. In the supermarket queue, I felt a wave of depression so complete I was tempted to lie down. Within a minute, the invisible wave flowed through and out of me, beyond the carpark of retirement-lump-sum SUVs, down the valley to the sea from whence - perhaps - it came.

Later, I had an hour to kill, so I went to the beach. The sea was a Farrow and Ball olive, the rain throwing itself to the ground, the wind scratching at clothes, birds and buildings. The wind was running the sea in shallow fast waves across the grain of the tide. The occasional gentle rocking of the car is the wind telling me how cold it is, and I was prepared to believe it. I was sat in the car, with no desire to get out.

In front of the car, the seawall. I have a photo, taken perhaps 70 years ago, of the old man¹ suited, foot on that exact spot on the wall, his pushbike still, drawing on one of the fags that 40 years later would hasten him to an early grave.

I’m often pleasingly troubled by revisiting old places. Finding elements exactly as they were - the rough walls angled along the seafront, the surface still marked just so. It feels as if I am staring at a cartoon, with only my lacking in understanding of how it might occur stopping me drawing that past into the now, or the now into the past. I guess that’s what writing is for.

Beyond the rounded wall, the sand where little me was sunburnt badly enough to peel Pringles of skin from my shoulders a week later. This was the beach of sandwich spread and sand sandwiches, of half melted mini Swiss rolls, perspiring cans of Cresta and - after what felt like an age of doing as I was told - a Mr Whippy.

A mile to the west - a two minute trip along the strip - the sea is a grubby turquoise. Joggers run their resolutions into reality, last night’s cigarette butts dance their way towards the docks; I see more than one person I think I recognise from school, brightly coloured duvet-coat insulating them against the chill.

Here, the wall is a narrow and pointed. As a kid, I’d sit on the top of it, one leg either side - a long, slender, stone horse, going nowhere - and try to gather the nerve to slide down the beachward slope to the gravel below. I’ve known that feeling so often since.

I’ve taken a longer, more complete break over Christmas than usual and I realise that these last few days had me wondering if I had lost the ability, perhaps even the urge, to write.

I realise that writing has quietly become like a fifth limb, a sixth taste, another sense by which I understand myself and the world, and that I can only go so long without writing before I feel detached, or perhaps incapable of being most fully who I am. As Geoff Nicholson wrote in The Lost Art of Walking, ‘Writing is one way of making the world our own and...walking is another.’ Amen.

Today I am here. Today I showed up and words have fallen out of me. I hope you like them. Thank you for showing up too.

Happy New Year.

Below, Fig sticky toffee pudding with tahini toffee sauce and more words…