A Cure For Melancholy?
Temporary at least...
I went down to Brighton on a business trip yesterday. Yes, I'm such an adult now, I do proper Business Trips, just like my dad. (Except I remember to come home from mine.)
It's kind of nice to be in an unfamiliar office, without distractions, as no one knew where to find me except the people I was meeting with. You can buckle down and get to business. Plus, there are long-haired hipster boys in the Brighton office, which we certainly don't get here, in an office full of clean cut City Boys.
After dinner with Archel, I decided to walk down to the seafront, even though it was dark. It just doesn't seem complete, a visit to Brighton, without going to the beach and at least looking at the water. (The colleague I went down with returned to London as soon as her meetings were done, and told me that she'd never actually visited the beach. So wrong!)
So I stood at the base of the pier, watching the waves crash against the beach on that little spit of land between the pier and the old chain pier. It's my favourite bit of the whole seafront, more due to the sound than its looks. The crash of the surf, then the crackly hiss of the pebbles being dragged back by the receding water. And then the whoosh as the retreating wave gets caught up in the undertow of the next one. It's mesmerising.
There's something so soothing about it, the sound, the cyclical nature of it, the way that the waves advance, and keep on advancing, a relentless cycle, sand through the hourglass like the days of our lives... Counting waves to see if the Ninth Wave really is the deepest, like Tennyson and Kate Bush told us. (They do ebb and flow, but it's not as regular as 9 or 7 or whatever, it can be as few as 4 and as many as 10 before the next combined wave-crest tosses water higher up on the beach.)
It's very hard to be sad when watching waves. Maybe I should make like all aging hipster and move down to the sea.
I went down to Brighton on a business trip yesterday. Yes, I'm such an adult now, I do proper Business Trips, just like my dad. (Except I remember to come home from mine.)
It's kind of nice to be in an unfamiliar office, without distractions, as no one knew where to find me except the people I was meeting with. You can buckle down and get to business. Plus, there are long-haired hipster boys in the Brighton office, which we certainly don't get here, in an office full of clean cut City Boys.
After dinner with Archel, I decided to walk down to the seafront, even though it was dark. It just doesn't seem complete, a visit to Brighton, without going to the beach and at least looking at the water. (The colleague I went down with returned to London as soon as her meetings were done, and told me that she'd never actually visited the beach. So wrong!)
So I stood at the base of the pier, watching the waves crash against the beach on that little spit of land between the pier and the old chain pier. It's my favourite bit of the whole seafront, more due to the sound than its looks. The crash of the surf, then the crackly hiss of the pebbles being dragged back by the receding water. And then the whoosh as the retreating wave gets caught up in the undertow of the next one. It's mesmerising.
There's something so soothing about it, the sound, the cyclical nature of it, the way that the waves advance, and keep on advancing, a relentless cycle, sand through the hourglass like the days of our lives... Counting waves to see if the Ninth Wave really is the deepest, like Tennyson and Kate Bush told us. (They do ebb and flow, but it's not as regular as 9 or 7 or whatever, it can be as few as 4 and as many as 10 before the next combined wave-crest tosses water higher up on the beach.)
It's very hard to be sad when watching waves. Maybe I should make like all aging hipster and move down to the sea.
posted by Masonic Boom | 3:00 pm
1 Comments:
The sea does sort everything out. Direct feelings of loss, too. It's just so big.
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