I like to stay up all night and sleep all day. Remember that, before the kids came? Like last Christmas when we binge-watched Netflix, just us. Then we went to Portobello beach. “No porto, no bello” my godmother used to say, amused (she visited many fine ports in her life), but in a way I think it is both beautiful and a port of a sort.
On New Year’s Day Porty beach reminds me of a Victorian holiday. Swimmers brave the ocean spray and we promenade side by side – timeless and we don’t need much to say. It’s a pleasure and a sanctuary – a tonic.
When we first came to Edinburgh, I felt sure that old craggy Arthur’s seat would be my beau, but we lived in Leith and my job was in Portobello at a recording studio with rehearsal rooms. I cycled every day, rain and shine, against and with the forces pushing from the north. No matter what was going on with us, with life, with work, Portobello beach had the ability to hold me up and bring me beyond myself.
The studio, based in an old Scottish Power archive building (where reams of paper data had been stored and catalogued) was always on borrowed time and was eventually washed away by the high tide of development. The aisles of Aldi now stand where once, women and men strummed and sang and beat their drums. The iron windows used to rattle in the briny evening air, reminiscent of the typewriters that tapped before them. The seagulls all line up, proud along the roof as they always were and I continue to visit the beach.
Staying up all night is for the young, who spark like plankton in the dark. Life moves on. We had a family but I never took to being a mum the way I assumed I would. Nothing prepared me for my crying child. The pressure – like the ocean abyss – is a mad midnight zone for me, but Portobello beach is accessible and the whingeing stops. They are happy and I can be. Children busily fetch water, dig sand, collect treasure... I sit without anyone demanding of me, like a gull resting on the water, just bobbing there on the surface in peace, watching.
The Firth of Forth is sometimes a luminescent window to the sky. Other days it is restless and turbulent or wild and expressive, spitting into the wind. It is ecstasy. It is melancholy. Mostly though, it is plain. The waves lap, unimaginative – disappointed. Their energy has gone. It has dissipated into the profound body of water. The sea and the beach become one.
Working nine to five it can be hard to keep real dreams alive and we find ourselves drifting like flotsam. I forget, but we live with the undertow of mental illness. It is threatening and is hard on us all, and some of the positives in our lives have been jettisoned over time to keep us afloat. Even now, in good health, there are issues that wrap around us like the rubbish left behind on the prom after a perfect day. It can be a storm and the kind of darkness that goes on and on but I’m a lighthouse and this dirty beach is a desert island. We don’t hit the rocks. The beach is littered, the sea is brown, the mountains are bleak but it is strangely beautiful and, directionless, the sea birds fly over. Here, I can dream.
It’s a summer’s day. It is like a Victorian holiday only we beach comb and find plastic instead of bone. I’m dreaming of being in a little boat. I row out away from the people to be like the sea birds that fly, directionless over Portobello beach.
The tide has turned and my youth is retreating slowly towards the wide horizon. My memories are like lugworms; clueless, popping up on the silt flats that sparkle in the winter light. I keep my own snapshot archives of pure happiness and this city beach is ever-present: I eat chips with my toddler – cheeks ruddy from the cold; I swim with my belly as full with baby as it could be the day before he was born; we glue our teeth together with home-made treacle toffee as we watch fireworks on bonfire night; we clink plastic flutes at sunset; my little girl draws lines in the sand that disappear like magic and the low sun shimmers across her; we eat ice cream in the wind; we eat oysters – handsome in the rain; we scuttle over rocks like crabs, looking for life; the light is dull and my two children – crouched down – are beaming.
I like to stay up all night and sleep all day, but it’s rarely a good idea. We’re leaving the city now, to seek space to grow with our young family. We won’t be as near to the beach. Without this desert island as a neighbour, I wonder where my next harbour will be. Which place will serve to remind me that heaven is here?