Wandering Like Clouds

North Sea Morning Swim Report, 7/10/2024

Mostly I swim alone. Occasionally somebody I don’t know that well will suggest coming along for my early morning Barton Springs swims, and I am quite aboveboard: NFI, as my late father-in-law would say. Not fucking invited. I do make very rare exceptions: I have gone to Barton Springs with two dear friends and one dear cousin.

This morning my ball-&-chain and our younger kid and I got up and walked from Burnham Overy Staithe to the edge of Holkham Beach and went for a swim.

(We’re staying in Burnham Overy Staithe; my older kid and my mother-in-law stayed back.)

On the way there and back we saw curlews and spoonbills and a little lizard, a slug and some caterpillars that might have been monarchs. No deer this morning, though we’ve seen all sorts on our five days in North Norfolk: doglike muntjacs, white fallow deer.

This part of the country is where I spent the saddest summer of my life, detailed in An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination—though now that I type that, I have no memory of how much I wrote about North Norfolk in that book. I always find the landscape very sympathetic. I mean, I feel it understands me, Holkham Beach especially. You have to walk a long way to the water, even at high tide. You have to work and then you must work up the courage for delight.

The ocean was cold, a little colder, I think, than Barton Springs. Entirely wonderful. We congratulated ourselves on being hearty. It’s been a while since I’ve swum in the ocean. I have never in my life swum in tropical water and have no interest: give me England, New England, water that’ll shock the system, sand cut with razor clams, all salt, no piña colada.