Hunting in the gale

On my childish route to school I find an unrestricted parking spot and leave my car, with a coat in the boot. I know I'm ill-clad for the weather, perhaps on purpose. I need to feel something, even if just cold.

Ranks of late twentieth century estate houses face the street that in my infancy was fringed with low prefabs. Bricks stacked for profit supplant homes built in hope. Only the topology of the roads and the constant presence of an electricity sub-station holding a junction are truly familiar, until I see a running culvert that dives through curved steel bars under the road - dangerous, come away.

School used to be right, past the memory of the corner garage, but I go straight on, into the breeze. Commercial property gives way here to retirement flats, petite stacked homes with forgotten balconies, clinging on, as close to the sea as is safe. In front, land falls away and I see the grey-green sea advancing in scribbled lines under a slate sky. The wind makes its presence felt, and I regret now, the coat, but only briefly.

A curving, sloping asphalt track leads down, revealing water crashing on groynes and I realise I have miscalculated. At half tide I anticipated a walk along the top of a beach, between the rotting foundations of a tumbled clay slope and a sometimes sandy tide line. Breakers are rolling in, touching the clay all along the strand. A knot of people are skipping from island to island on their way towards me and a lone dog walker is walking through the shallow wash in tall boots. I make a step from shingle to sand to mark the beach and, to let it mark me. Another dozen steps sideways widen the view and I face the incoming sea, the buffeting wind and watch, and watch, until the dog walker passes, smiles and starts the climb towards her car park.

Something has broken through, something has been touched. I leave the curious dog enough time to pass and follow it, back up to the top, where gulls and corvids alike hang or swoop with the rising currents.