I remember

The Belgian seaside is covered in cement. As a child I remember the boardwalk in Koksijde and how I spent → a lot of time looking at the ocean. I remember swimming with my grandmother in the sea; she would play with me in the cold waves for hours.

I remember attending a lecture → at the aquarium in the Tiergarten in Berlin. I saw jellyfish swimming in one of the basins – they looked science fiction! Jellyfish are such interesting creatures; their bodies are 99% water and they are very ancient. They have existed ever since the beginning of the world.

In Portugal you can fish mainly cod and sardines. My uncle used to go out for days and days with big industrial ships to fish. I remember going with my mother to the harbor to see him when he returned.

I remember seeing the ocean as an unapproachable monster. The thing with swimming is: I swim badly. My uncle does not know how to swim. Only the boys would risk it, entering the ocean without knowing how to swim.

I’m an ocean baby really, as I spent the first part of my life beside the sea in suburban Australia. Mansfield’s story At the Bay connects to lots of what I remember about living beside the sea as a child. I recommend you read it and pay special attention to the way that Mansfield uses various speech styles and manners (especially by children) to evoke the spell that the sea and nature has over the diverse characters in the story.

The experience of being on the ship, the sounds, smells, vibrations and all the amazing sensory elements that the ocean offered filtered through my state of illness and fever. This all delivered a series of very beautiful histrionic and poetic impressions. For instance, I remember sitting in a muddy paddock in British Samoa and watching through feverish eyes, and with the sound of the sea in the background, a local funeral party under some trees that included the slaughtering of a pig.

The farm had a hill on it. We had about 50 sheep. I remember one stormy night, when my parents and I had gone out, the river overflowed and flooded the meadow where the sheep were grazing. When we came back in the middle of the night, we found all the sheep crammed on this one tiny hill and surrounded by water. I remember having to carry them, one by one, from the hill to the house across the water. It was in the Midlands.

My grandparents had a house by the sea in the Netherlands. It was in Zeeland, a part of Holland, which is → close to the sea. → We used to sit in those wooden cabins near the sea. I remember that at night, you could see little larvae that lit up in the water.

In many places we “live with our backs to the water,” → I remember people saying this about many cities in Turkey.

I remember loving the feeling of touching the sea or having it around me. Back then, I was not afraid of it. But then again, my parents only took me when it was docile + warm. That was the Belgian sea, of course. It was the only sea I saw for a really long time. I had to turn 20 before seeing another sea. (This is without counting Lake Como, in Italy.)

I remember taking the mailboat from here to Dover with my mother. We used to take it every year. For shopping. The journey is about four hours each way. It was my mother’s idea of going to England. We would only go if sea was calm, of course. Before the trip, my father would look out of the window in the early morning to assess the weather.