Nature savours another perfect day

ON Easter Monday, at noon, newly released after a few days in the garage (by which I mean the hospital), I sat on a tussock in a warm spot by the bay and listened to the surf gently break and thanked the gods for being alive on such a day.

The sun shone on my back where I sat protected from the breeze, watching gusts riffle the blue sea and spread out across it, the patterns of wind on water.

Between me and the further shore – and the house where we lived when we first returned to Ireland – white horses broke on a sandbank, more like white porpoises or salmon in shallow water fighting against the current to move upstream.

Two adult herring gulls cruised offshore and, because I was sitting quietly, gradually moved to the edge of the surf and drifted unafraid 20 yards from me. Lovely, they looked, riding the blue water, these common birds with white heads and breasts, mantles of silver grey and yellow beaks with a bright red spot and a yellow iris in the eye.

Scavengers they might sometimes be, but how clean they were, and peaceful, afloat in the element of lapping surf and rippling sea, clearly a bonded pair, not feeding, just drifting, just passing the time as I was and, perhaps, also enjoying the beauty of the day.

Some walkers passed, with coloured caps and jackets. The wind blowing over the exposed sand was still sharp, but where I sat I might have been in Greece, by the Aegean, rather than west Cork, by the Atlantic. But who’d bother recalling balmy days in Greece in such a spot? Memory’s white beaches and sparkling seas are marvellous to give comfort amongst the concrete of the city, a holiday remembered, a holiday looked forward to, but not here. In London, Yeats, standing on “the pavements grey” was comforted by the memory of “lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore”. The memory of these sounds sustained the great poet, and inspired a great poem.

But here, before me where I sat, was the living sea, rippled by a living breeze, with the sighs and gurgles of the surf breaking and a salt tang in the air. I recalled Shelley’s poem, composed by the Bay of Naples, with surely some of the loveliest lines of the many written about the sea... “The sun is warm, the sky is clear,/The waves are dancing fast and bright...” The sheer simplicity paints afresh that long-ago Italian noon-time of light on water,.

Shelley goes on to say, “Blue isles and snowy mountains wear/ The purple noon’s transparent light.” That was in Italy; here, in west Cork, my view is hazy, high cloud to the north and east, the sky still clear behind me to the south. Later, there will be rain, the forecasters say. Across the bay, beyond our old abode with its surround of tall Monterey Cypresses, a dozen bungalows bask in the sun, each different, with a garden around, old bungalows, small against the big winter-ploughed fields climbing the hill above. Behind me, in the hedge, a robin suddenly bursts into song, the first sound to cut across the whisper of the surf. Near me, a solitary gorse bush is in resplendent flower. Now, before the rain comes, Greek islands or Italian bays couldn’t better the peace of this place.

Throwing off such unwholesome thoughts, I rise to walk the length of the strand. I find the seat of my trousers damp. A wet backside, but what-the-hell, the wind behind me will soon dry me out. My son’s girlfriend, fresh from London, told me this morning about a rook she saw pick up a crust of bread and finding it too hard to swallow carried it to a rain-filled pothole on the road and dipped it. Smart crow! Give me a parliament of rooks before the left-over self-servers still in situ.