Spurn Point

Was going to write a pretty piece all about a finger of land, on whose tip I’d returned to sit.  Driven down from Brynmor Jones, passing ports, cranes and mills; the complex windings of pipes and flares; sun piercing rain-heavy skies, horizons fleeing to left and right where Danelaw rivers drain to the sea.

It’s 26 years since I drove a van down this asphalt vein beneath a lightening sky, as far as the lighthouse and RNLI, where a small posse of cars were huddled, losing themselves in the space. 

We’d escaped a party in Hyde Park; mix-tapes, windows down, power stations, webs of sodium reaching out across the hills; to emerge in the edgy light of dawn, cold aggressive sea in front, estuarine flatness behind; killing the tape, saucer-eyed, to dig the hiss of reeds. 

I don’t know how I forgot.  The line has been breached.  Slabs of asphalt lie like decoration on the sand.  A new beach reaches from here to the tip of the finger – the lighthouse remains, overseeing distant freighters passing to Immingham, Grimsby and Hull, or slipping out on the tide.

Clumps of reed lie flattened, awaiting the next storm; waves goad from drunken blocks, close enough to spit.  Where the dune gives way to dust, above the snapped and tangled roots, someone has planted a plastic rose, like a painted Madrileño amongst the khaki twitchers lugging their lenses and poles.

I stand for a while and enjoy the space; silent ships, a windfarm sneering over the platforms pumping the last natural gas; a wash of refineries and chemical works; a tower rising above it all – Grimsby, perhaps?

Then it’s time to walk back to the car, knowing that somewhere beyond the breach there’s a courier van with a couple of heads; eyes like saucers, ears like shells, taking everything in.