Personal Blogs

Sunrise, Pilling sands. West coast for sure, but the seeing the sun come up is always somewhat special wherever you are. We were strung-out and strung-out along the beach.

I wasn't thinking about much, I was barefoot, my baseball boots tied around my neck and covered in sand—there had been shenanigans in the night. I wanted a fag but everything was soaked. What we did have were a couple of cases of ready-mixed cocktails that tasted foul but which we were drinking anyway. Mine was a metallic pina-colada.

The girls were mostly sprawled on the shingles sporting sun-specs, the boys were all over, pretending to be explorers. Pat and another couple of the guys were doing some kind of pogo thing, I wandered over to see what this was all about.

"Look trampoline sand!"

They were jumping up and down, the sand was acting strangely like rubber. A slight alarm bell rang in my head and I became aware of a noise that hadn't been there a minute ago.

"What's that noise?"

"What noise?", they were whooping and jumping for all they were worth. I looked seawards, there was a disturbance on the horizon. There was a ribbon of something between sand and sky that hadn't been there a minute ago.

"Shite, the tide, it's a bloody riptide here...let's get out of here". I looked back at them, Pat was up to his knees in the sand which had stopped behaving like rubber. He was shrinking as I watched.

"I'm stuck".

I hope that I'm never ever that scared again, I can't even imagine how scared Pat was.

Panic and adrenaline took over. We hauled him out [he dislocated a shoulder during the process] and then we ran for the shingles.

The tide was a foot or so high and moved about the speed of city-traffic. There was a part of me that said, 'so what', but I knew that if it caught us we were likely to be over as people. It would knock us over and drag us under. Thankfully we'd had more time than we deserved.

The girls were laughing at us as we made the beach, Pat immediately started moaning about the pain in his shoulder and I noticed that I'd lost my baseball boots.

I really wanted a fag.