Burnham Overy Staithe

It was one of those classic 'dazzle' late afternoons when I arrived at Overy so I had a quick walk down the bank and then we somehow managed to get mum in the car and returned for an ice cream. It was fascinating to watch the art of effortlessly eating a 99 without a drip and the skilful management of the flake was still stored and retrieved from the depths of the memory banks, and yet, with all the years living there, having no sense of where she was and no memory of past times there. The present though was timeless, we watched the tide come in, the boats swinging on to the pull of their anchors, walkers over the Cockle Path in the late sun mistiming the tide and having to swim the creek, sailors tacking across the streaming tide, dodging moored boats and the late light lengthening and deepening the sense of place of everything in the moment.

Sea to the West - Norman Nicholson

When the sea's to the west
The evenings are one dazzle-
You can find no sign of water.
Sun upflows the horizon:
Waves of Shine
Heave, crest, fracture,
Explode on the shore:
The wide day burns
In the incandescent mantle of the air.

Once, fifteen,
I would lean on handlebars,
Staring into the flare,
Blinded by looking,
Letting the gutterings and sykes of light
Flood into my skull.

Then, on the stroke of bedtime,
I'd turn to the town,
Cycle past purpling dykes
To a brown drizzle
Where black-scum shadows
Stagnated between backyard walls.
I pulled the warm dark over my head
Like an eiderdown.

Yet in that final stare when I
(five times, perhaps, fifteen)-
Creak protesting away-
The sea to the west
The land darkening-
Let my eyes at the last be blinded
Not by the dark
But by dazzle.