The only diary I’ve ever kept for more than a few days was during a two week stay at my grandma’s house in the Essex countryside. It was the summer before my first year at Oxford, and my mom and I were staying in a small cabin out in the garden, which had just about room enough for a bed, narrow desk, and two sealed suitcases.
We had spent the earlier part of the summer watching BBC Four’s Detectorists, a television series which follows the Danebury Metal Detecting Club as they trawl the hazily sunny English countryside; it seemed something of a mirage to us. The backlit poppies, recently ploughed fields, and breezy English oak branches sparkled to the tune of the series’ theme song, sung by folk singer-songwriter Johnny Flynn. We found ourselves, in the equally hazy transition from summer into the early, warmer days of Autumn, faced with the opportunity to live as buoyantly as the poppies, with Johnny Flynn playing in the background.
Where we might have enjoyed an incredibly unstructured couple of weeks, we found ourselves rigidly following the schedule of the ocean’s tide. A short drive away from my grandma’s house is Brightlingsea Beach, which features a pool refreshed by the high tide, a small harbour for paddle boats and the more irritating jet skis, and sandy stretches until the sand turns to mud. In terms of swimming, most locals – and the swimmers are mostly locals – favour Splash Point: a series of concrete steps leading down to a deeper descent into the groynes, aptly named, as the water splashes over the sea wall on choppy days.
Open water, and specifically cold water swimming, has recently seen a surge in popularity, a trend which has also inspired a number of students here in Oxford to take it up in Port Meadow, and Hinksey Lake. The swims are organised in such a fashion as to bring like-minded people together. This usually occurs through Facebook groups. My mom and I, however, showed up for our first swim at high tide to find a group of swimmers – primarily women, primarily older – frolicking, for lack of a more accurate word.
Splash Point is unswimmable when the tide is low and the mud flats are left exposed, leaving a comfortable hour of swim time once each day. We quickly realised that despite the lack of formal organisation, this group of swimmers was a community united in their shared tidal-centric schedule. After a few days, we began to talk with some of the women. They revealed that they had been making up stories about me and where I maybe came from. Thereafter, each high tide we would be greeted with the same warm “hi ladies!” And after every swim, my mom and I would stop by the beach cafe for a bacon bap and hot chocolate, which became more and more welcome the faster the water’s temperature dropped. Everyday my diary read: “swimming again with the high tide ladies.”
As the days went on, fewer swimmers showed up. There were tides where we had the stretch of sea all to ourselves, and comments from chilly passersby – “warmer in there I reckon!” – were frequent. The same person had been serving us our bacon baps and hot chocolate each day, and she began to question our persistence as October neared. On our last day in Brightlingsea, she greeted us: “hello! I knew you crazy ladies would come!” to which we had to bid her a sad goodbye.
I had returned for solo visits, and swims, throughout the following year, but it was only over a year later that my mom and I returned together. Still with Johnny Flynn playing in the hire car, we made our way to an early morning high tide at Splash Point. This time, the memory of summer did not linger; it was undeniably winter. The water was so cold it was painful, and we only managed to immerse ourselves for a minute or so. While there was no crowd of swimmers, immediately we recognised a couple of our friends from the summer before last. I could tell that they didn’t recognise us. Still, the women introduced themselves, unknowingly, for a second time. They were as cheery and welcoming as when we first joined the high tide swimmers, and we never corrected them. Instead, I silently swelled with an immense gratitude for the tide, for both continuing to come in and for continuing to create joy in its purest form, like clockwork. I am content that if I were to swim tomorrow, at high tide, I would most likely find a friendly face that knew and understood how the sea guided me throughout some of the most peaceful and reviving weeks I’ve lived so far.
Image credit: Estelle Atkinson
