I had been working for fewer
days a week for a while and I was looking to fill in time profitably. I had had enough of the meretricious Judge Judy and those vacuous fools who
vacillate about moving house, whilst a pretty woman last seen on an
advertisement for household insurance exhorts them to make a decision, for
Heaven’s sake.
I had cleared up the garden, washed the tops of the
skirting-boards in the downstairs passage, polished my old guitar with Mr Sheen, downloaded fifty of my
favourite morose songs onto Spotify,
half-completed an inventory of my tools, written a poem about the Gila monster,
and built a computer table out of what looked like the remnants of a mezzanine
floor. I had completely run out of
things to do.
In despair, I drove down
to the coast. I thought I might find
some inspiration if I gazed out into the far distance for long enough. It had seemed to work for that lugubrious
long-haired Scot on TV and his myopic colleague who used to follow the route of
ancient maps on a racing bicycle.
I stood
lamely on the table-flat sand, under a blue-and-white striped umbrella, as the
rain buried itself about me. The tide
was ebbing fast, exposing tracts of inviting but treacherous shoreline. The sea was dead calm, apart from a few
flecks of white foam that sat atop the feeble waves like spittle on an old
man’s lips. In the half-light, the sea had taken on the same wagtail-grey hue
as the sky. I could just make out a
phalanx of Eider Ducks bobbing about like apples on the water. A cormorant, skimming
over the surface like a flat stone, startled me out of my reverie. I reflected that Cockenzie could be a pretty
dismal place on a wet evening in the early spring, although there was harmony
in its awfulness and a nascent beauty in its uniform drabness. On that evening, the sea was as featureless
as a colour-wash and the promenade as predictable as a parking attendant. In the morning, though, the sea might be blue
as an emerald and the sand might be dancing with happy children under an
orotund sun. The next morning, I could perhaps
furl my blue-and-white striped umbrella and heave it into the boot of my
car. I could then possibly walk along
the promenade and touch the brim of my Panama hat to the women in their
deck-chair clothes. I could then see the sea for what it really was – a
contented old friend. I am, as is the
ocean, in the words of Charles Lamb, ‘a bundle of prejudices – made up of
likings and dislikings.’ The next
morning, it scarcely even grew light. Besides, I
had to wash the car and plant forty-six pansies.
