It’s about half past ten in the morning, I think. I’m not absolutely sure; I gave up clocks and watches a few days ago. All I know is that the sun is white-gold, the wind low and, through the window, the sea beckons. Time to marinate myself in sunscreen. Pick up the cabana chair, sunglasses, hat. Walk over the lawn, which bleeds into white sand. I take fifty steps and I’ve arrived.
There’s nobody at all on the beach. Just sand, powder-fine, cowrie shells sunbathing lazily near the water’s edge. I set down the cabana.
A sudden movement. Silver on blue. A fin. Two fins. Now three. Dolphins playing about two metres from shore, putting on a show just for me. I call the kids, tell them to hurry and thirty seconds later they race down the path worn through the scrub and stand by my side watching the dolphins roll over, squirt water into the air, wave, circle back and then, finally, swim away.
The only sounds are the smiles breaking over our faces.
We’ve seen dolphins before, lots of times, but they’re that rare thing that never ceases to be wonderful, like the Eiffel Tower silhouetted against a sunset-sky.
The kids drop onto the sand or into the water. I lie on my chair. Read a few chapters. Sometimes I look up and watch nothing, just the water, which is a shimmering Cézanne-blue, the kind of ocean people travel around the world to see—but all I have to do is walk fifty paces out my door and there it is.
Perhaps, then, I’m not watching nothing. I’m watching all the beauty in that January moment. Breathing it in as if it might somehow touch the part of me that writes stories and, in so doing, lend its majesty to the next words I set down on paper.
Each day is the same. Wake. Breakfast on the deck, cup of tea, morning pages. Sunscreen, cabana, sunglasses, hat. Walk. Sit. Read. Watch. Swim. Dolphins, sometimes. The days have nothing but rhythm, like the sea, like words in a sentence.
I’m reminded of how I’ve always fallen in love with prose and with writers who value rhythm. How I’ve always instinctively and deliberately prioritised rhythm in my own sentences.