Low tide, long shadows
The stiff sea breeze smelled of salt and ozone, and Murphy’s paws pressed small crescents into the wind-rippled sand. I’d taken the long route — past the red-brick terrace where the chip shop once drew Friday crowds, and beyond the flaked benches and fun-fair huts nailed shut for winter — because the tide had retreated to the bare horizon, leaving a shining plain where he could carve figure-eights, Cocker Spaniel ears streaming like black pennants in the breeze.
It’s always the emptiness of this landscape that strikes me first, followed by a sense of unease, like a ledger that refuses to balance. I look back at the distant sea wall where, in the late nineties, my friends and I — sixteen and certain the new century would bend to us — would perch after an underage night on the town, legs dangling, trainers brushing the wall, talking until the tide turned. Staring out to sea, we’d tell each other that the internet and cheap flights would rescue us from parochial boredom, speaking of “the information age” as though it were a coming festival. Those same friends, now in their early-to-mid forties, appear only in photographs — weddings, corporate retreats, birthday cakes with the candles already blown out — and the wall is vacant save for gulls making a racket that seems, these days, less like a cry for food than a complaint no one will register.
Murphy nosed a small glass bottle wedged in a skein of seaweed. The thing was heavy, sea‑green, its shoulders thick with the sort of rippled glass you find in junk‑shop medicine flasks. A thumbnail of sepia paper still clung to one flank: serif letters ghosted beneath a faded barley sprig engraving. Stranger still, H.T. 1893 was faintly embossed in the shoulder, visible only when the light caught it side-on. Odd that a Victorian vessel should wash up intact after a century of storms when last month’s beer cans corrode to lace. I slipped the relic into the pocket of my coat. Murphy looked up, impatient, so I called him to heel and decided to head home while there was still light.
Everything in town feels temporary these days; the only structures that endure are the hoardings promising to replace what we once loved. On the High Street six storefronts stand boarded: one trumpets an “Artisanal Experience Coming Soon”, another proclaims an imminent “crypto café” — though I suspect it will end up as yet another vape shop. The remaining units languish behind plywood while the café’s LED-blue advertising screen flattens every passing face, turning locals and tourists alike into brief holograms.
I reminded myself that an unplanned pint had already rounded off last night, but the Anchor squats dangerously close to my route home and Murphy enjoys the attention. The place is the oldest pub in town — low, soot-smoked beams, and tonight roaring with a fire that looks ready to swallow the Georgian surround. The staff are given to piling logs so high — old decking and builders’ off-cuts included — that the hearth resembles a bonfire with a ceiling.
I order a pint that costs more than a minor traffic offence once did. Around me cluster thirty-somethings from Birmingham and Croydon, ex-coders and displaced middle managers talking about “exit velocity” and “rural fintech”. Most weeks now, another handful of urban refugees appear, chasing cheap rents and an Instagrammable sea view. Their optimism feels imported, shrink-wrapped like supermarket fish. They tell me city living costs are ruinous; here, at least, the sea breeze is free and the council can be ignored.
Propped against the bar is Anchor stalwart Ronnie, tall as ever, curly grey hair haloed by firelight, grin suggesting he has already sold the moon on a finance plan. He greets me with a wink — “How’s the head? No nightmares about skeletal cats, I hope” — then launches into a yarn for the newcomers about once fitting mahogany skirting in a Russian oligarch’s submarine. Kate, the twenty-something barmaid with talon nails and artfully applied eyeliner, rolls her eyes but keeps pouring; she saves her real scorn for visitors who call the place “quaint”.
Malcolm — a ferry-hand in his late fifties — overhears the word oligarch and seizes the moment, launching into a patient, Thatcher-hating lecture on how nationalising everything from ferries to phone boxes would set the country right by Easter. He’s lived here nearly fifteen years, yet his Newcastle burr remains as thick as stout. He arrived back when the town was still mostly locals and took root on the car-ferry night shift, so despite the accent everyone files him under one of us. Ronnie eggs him on, Kate sighs theatrically, and the ex-coders nod with alcoholic diplomacy. Murphy, bored of revolution, curls beneath my stool and dreams of gulls.
By the time Kate has taken my empty glass, the early sunset has turned the windows dark enough to mirror the firelight inside. I rise from my stool, exchange nods all round, and step out with Murphy into air that already smells faintly of frost. I drop my hand into my coat pocket on the way out. My fingers closed around the bottle again — cool, smooth, oddly weighty. Behind us Malcolm’s manifesto rolls on, punctuated by Kate’s dry asides and Ronnie’s outrageous confirmations. Their voices drift up the street after us — warm pockets of sound in the cooling dusk — until they fold into the hush of closing shops and the slow beat of waves beyond the promenade. The dog tugs toward home, and I follow, carrying the evening’s chatter like a heavy coat that, somehow, has begun to feel pleasantly warm.