Humberston seaside walk shows challenge of capturing life’s small but important moments - Ian McMillan

So here I am, with my tiny notebook, walking up to the edge of the sea at Humberston, south of Cleethorpes, just to see what I can notice. I’m with my wife and my mother-in-law and to be honest I’m a little sleepy and so I’m hoping a brisk walk and a note-taking session will liven me up a bit.

Of course the first things I notice are the huge ones: the sky that only just fits the space allotted to it and the water that seems to stretch all the way across the world. I want to look closer, though. The grass that is slowly colonising this end of the beach is covered with crowds of sea violet, a lovely plant that, when glimpsed from a distance, could almost be the Purple Haze that Jimi Hendrix sang about.

My notebook is busy: I write that phrase “purple haze” down. Close up, each individual sea violet plant is intricate and beautifully constructed. I write that down too. In the distance some people are sea-fishing but they are so far away that their fishing rods are like scribbles or hairs. I like those images too: I write them down. Scribbles, hairs.

In one sense, when I’m feverishly taking notes like this, I’m a bit like those tourists you see who walk along holding up cameras so that they can capture everything they see on film, and then it seems that the experience they’re having is a kind of second-hand one with everything mediated through the flatness of a screen, like so many of our experiences have been during the last few months.

I like to think that my note-making is different, although maybe it isn’t; I like to think that I’m re-experiencing the things I’m seeing by trying to write them down, rather than de-experiencing them by looking through a lens.

A skylark tries to scare us off because we’re near its nest and then it explodes into the air, singing to distract us. On the horizon, which is like a line drawn in pencil, long boats shuffle slowly. The old rusty forts in the Humber look like two pieces of forgotten punctuation.

I know I should put the notebook down for a minute and just look, but that’s like telling a harp player to stop and listen to the silence. The harp player rehearses to become a better harpist and I write things down to become a better writer.

The small things, though; they’re the tricky ones. Like the tiny notes the skylark is playing on its feathered instrument. Quick, write that down.

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James Mitchinson

Editor