Notes from the sea wall, February

I walk the same stretch of embankment most afternoons — about two miles out and two back, between the pumping station and the point where the wall gives up and becomes a bank of shingle that nobody maintains.

In February I started writing down what I saw, not for a book, just to stop the walk going by unnoticed. Eight weeks of it and the notebook is more useful than anything I did at a desk in the same period.

What the list looks like

4th. Wall wet to two feet on the seaward side at 3pm. Not spring tide. Two men from the board with a level, not talking.

11th. Curlews back. The word for the sound is not “call”. It is closer to a question.

19th. Somebody has put a bench at the turn, unofficially, made from a pallet. By the 26th there is a second one.

That is the whole method. No adjectives if I can help it, times where I have them, and a note when I do not know the word for something.

Why the not-knowing matters

The curlew entry is the one I keep going back to. I have heard curlews all my life and I have never once had a satisfactory word for the sound. Every time I have written it, I have written a cliché.

Not knowing is a flag. It means the thing is still alive to me, and the sentence I eventually write about it will have to be built rather than remembered. Half of what makes prose feel secondhand is that the writer reached for a word they already had.

The benches

Two pallet benches in a fortnight, put there by nobody official, at exactly the point where the walk turns. Nobody asked permission. Nobody will take them away.

That is the entire subject of the book I am writing now, and I would not have found it sitting indoors thinking about themes. It was on a list between a tide height and a bird.