Dover. Southwest 4 to 6, increasing 7 or gale 8 for a time. Thundery showers. Moderate or good, occasionally poor.
On Équihen-Plage, the wind angles north east across the beach. The tide is falling.
Sand skitters, shimmers, bifurcates and deltas, rattles over the surface. Forming miniscule dunes against every obstacle. Seaweed becomes an embossed relief of itself.
Surf, foam, spume, creamy, folding, drawing the tide line, becoming bile green. Gathers in wobbling, shaking, shivering masses that break apart and cartwheel across the beach, racing for the blobby, repellent mounds cannoned against the base of the cliffs.
Salt whips into a thick fog that smudges land, sea, air. Miraging the view so buildings fall away as the sea boils, steams, rises to the lowering, glowering clouds.
The wind blows a beach stream uphill so water sinks and bulges in turns like a vein stroked against the flow. A Little Egret sways as gusts hit its elongated form. Yellow feet gangle from a pool as it tumbles, dips, and crash-lands sideways.
Formation-gulls dare-devil the uprising against the cliffs, boy-racers revving up in coiling holding patterns. Above the surface of the sea, they undulate, mew, slice and stall and roller-coaster up again, revelling in the sheer fun of it.
The wind, the sea, the land, the horizons shift and bulge, slip and fall and rise again. Waves break metres from the apparent tide line. Water becomes quick, melting sand. Sand becomes water. Shallows eddy, whirl, pool, race against the dropping tide. A counter-flow, digging, scouring, sculpting and excavating temporary morphologies. A rise and fall of sand, water and foam. A moating of rocks. A shattering, a tearing, a gouging, a battering, blundering, breaking sea. It’s exhilarating, breath-stealing, enchanting, treacherous. Calling me, beckoning me.
Mudwriter 