The sea, turnstones, too-tight shoes and the best roasted pears
Abundance: Wednesday 16 October
I left Oxfordshire early on a glorious morning last week, the first crystal frost turning to droplets, mist candy-flossing the vales around Bristol, long shadows throwing themselves across fields and over hedges, and for a moment I thought: ‘I could live here’.
Yesterday and today reminded me I could not.
I need the sea. I need the edge. I need long views full of light. And I think - most of all - I need the sea’s permanent movement. Little me couldn’t get his head around the sea never sleeping, that at night it came in and out with every bit the conviction it did in the day. Even though no-one was there to see it. It never sleeps, even when it appears still. I couldn’t understand that it never got tired. It seemed magical.
Yesterday, I walked up the estuary to the small town where I lived when I first left home. If ever humans demonstrated a lack of energy so entirely the opposite of the sea’s tidal shift, it was the occupants of that house. Our clock moved around 4 hours from the norm, we ate giro-day Canadian pancakes with maple syrup and cream in the local cafe, we scoured record shops; it was not unusual to watch 3 films a day hired from the video shop. A pub less than 30 yards from our door - a sofa-ed front room in a residential street, a bell to summon its owner from watching the TV to serve the pints - knew no better business than when we lived there. It may be no coincidence that it is no longer a pub.
The view across the estuary from the end of that street looks as precious and peaceful as when we lived there. Oyster catchers, turnstones1 and more letting us know all about it from the shallow water and the silty flats. I’m not sure any of that view has materially changed in the decades since we lived there.
On the way home, I stopped at the beach. I drank a sunny coffee on the stones: the kind of day where you are warm in the sun and chilled to the bone when a cloud draws across it. Kids playing in the October shallows; grown ups warming hands on flat whites. A paddle boarder coasts by. Everyone is alright. Everything is - at least for a few moments - alright.
This morning, a 6 miler with a hill that always livens the blood. With me, the hound - laid up a year ago, immobile with a slipped disc - he now bounds up slopes, skits into hollows in the hedges, delights in excrement deposited by other species, and generally behaves with more vim than he did before his back went. It is very good to have the little shitbag back so lively.
However roundabout the route, the path almost always takes me to the edge. Even here this morning, feet on grass, looking down from the cliff top, it gives me whatever it is I need.
Whether at the estuary, many metres above it, or on the stones between tides, the sea settles me. It lets the noise of life out of the plughole. I feel like a rug with its runkles smoothed flat. As if I’ve taken off a pair of too-tight shoes.
On the way home, I noticed three things: few acorns, fewer sloes and an absence of hazelnuts. The first - the fruit of the oak - I have no interest in consuming, but jays, badgers, mice and squirrels are among the many who do; the second - the fruit of the blackthorn - are good for little in my kitchen beyond the familiar sloe gin; the third, is the one I will miss most. That said, the sweet chestnut trees are bending with nuts: this year at least, what you lose on the hazelnut swings you gain on the chestnut roundabout.
Heading back up the river, it dawned on me that - if I’m honest - I quite like a year without a particular harvest: it sharpens my appreciation for it when it reappears, and in sloe’s case, it’s rarely a real absence as I almost always over-produce sloe gin and have a bottle from last year to make sitting by a winter fire this year more appealing.
So while the sloes and hazelnuts may come and go, the sea remains as it did to little me - constant, settling and magical - and no passing moment, no fleeting shadows or candy-flossing of the fields can replace that. So here I’ll stay.
Roasted pears with cardamom cream and crushed hazelnuts
Recipe and more words below