MENTAL SEASCAPES

The Mediterranean: the Middle-Sea for My Middle Age

As the decades wash over me, leaving rock pools of memory, I find I no longer crave the raging ocean

The Med is just a salty lake, a puddle.

That was what I used to think. I grew up in Northwest England — the Irish Sea lapped the shoreline of my youth. Hardly a raging ocean, no Mauian breakers. But it was tidal.

Summer holidays in Wales meant scrabbling down to rock pools to explore their marine microcosms with intrepid fingers, fearless of crab claws and anemones.

A trip to the beach at Formby would mean trudging a mile to dip your toes in the surf at low tide. Or the waves might be washing over the sand dunes just hours later at the other end of the cycle.

We even had our own Mont-Saint-Michel in miniature on our doorstep: Hilbre Island. You could walk across the causeway at low tide. But stay too long and you’d be marooned like Ben Gunn.

That magical, piratical cycle of the tides was what made a sea, a sea, for me.

In my brief time in Barcelona as a student, I fell head over heels in love with the city. But not its Mediterranean Sea. If I’d ventured further north along the Costa Brava I might have been more convinced. But then again, probably not. The craggy cliffs and coves certainly look the part. But the sea just sits there, sulking.

No constantly replenished rock pools, no magically revealed causeways. Just a smudged line along the rocks, like the ring of muck left around a bathtub when the plug’s pulled out. A lavatorial plop and slosh as miniature waves fill the cracks and hollows.

Call that a Wild Coast?

Galicia beckons. You can keep your Sagrada Família. I give you Tibidabo. The towering crags and hammering breakers of the Atlantic are the only temple architecture for me!

I spent two years working in Spain’s northwest corner, and as much of my free time as I possibly could, walked its coastal paths. Now that was a sea, an ocean, a revelation! Cliffs a hundred metres high, and on a stormy day the waves would smash halfway up and fleck you with spray.

Gaze westwards in the knowledge there was not a scrap of land between you and Nova Scotia, three thousand miles across the oceanic expanse. You could feel the full force of every inch of that gathered momentum as it pounded the granite. Not so much the channelled power of the whole globe, as the entire cosmos.

If you ever need a place to plant your feet on stony ground and bellow into the gaping vastness, I cannot believe there is any better spot on earth than a clifftop in Galicia.

The high water mark of my love for the sea, in every sense.

Then I moved back to the Med.

And gradually attuned myself to its placid philosophy.

The Costa Brava was in fact the first stretch of Mare Nostrum that I made my own. Its picturesque charms won me over. The hitherto frustrating calmness of its waters proved in fact to be a real attraction once it became the setting for campsite weekends with young children.

Somewhat more toddler-friendly than those 100-foot Galician sea monsters.

No rockpools, though, as I still grumbled to myself, annoyed that my kids were missing out on what I felt to be an essential element of any beach trip.

It was on visit to Denia, after moving further south to the Valencia region, that the Mediterranean dispelled my abiding scepticism. We popped up the van roof and headed straight down from our campsite to the plateau of rock that passed for a beach, just as the tide was heading out.

You could actually see the difference here because of the way the rocks were shelved, like swimming pool steps, flattering the modest swell.

My son saw a shell move, and picked it up out of curiosity. Little eyestalks and legs emerged, blinking and flailing in bewilderment. The first hermit crab he had ever seen in the flesh! Or rather carapace. We peered down at the rock. Had that shell moved as well? It had! Another one, and another.

The place was teeming with hermit crabs. And spiky sea urchins of the deepest purple. This was maybe even better than a rock pool. We had a whole wildlife documentary set all to ourselves.

The Med had ticked off another box on my personal maritime checklist.

Our family followed the wave further south, to Altea. We were looking to rent a little house outside of town with a bit of a garden, but there were none to be had, so we ended up in a flat overlooking the port.

I say ‘ended up’ like it was some kind of hardship, but it absolutely wasn’t. There was a balcony with the most magnificent view of the bay, bookended by its headlands, and the fishing port straight ahead. A small-scale affair, but still functioning despite the local economy’s conversion to slightly twee tourism.

The boats would chug out of the harbour every morning, returning later to offload at the market at the end of the quay. The van from the fishmonger’s directly beneath our flat would drive the 500 metres or so along the broad back of the breakwater, and come back laden with crates of fresh fish on ice, to be slapped on the shopfront slab.

And it was as I watched this ritual play out one day, sitting on the balcony, that I had my little Mediterranean epiphany. This was the magic, the mystery and majesty it concealed. The simple routine of daily life, repeated over centuries, millennia. And not just here in Altea, but all around the whole basin.

I could be in any whitewashed fishing village, in Spain, Greece, Turkey, Lebanon; in any century. And I would be witnessing essentially the same patterns of life, shared and exchanged across the ages, from Phoenicians to Romans to Venetians, right down to our Boomers and Millennials.

Boats heading out with their varied produce and practices. Trading and traversing, forging our European culture and mythology. Ferrying olive oil and wine, people and ideas, back and forth, then as now. Gradually weaving the Mare Nostrum into a shared spiritual home.

The wild, oceanic changeability that so invigorated my youthful self was all very well, but after decades of restlessness, it was time to ease myself gently into the hammock of middle age, in the home that had been awaiting me for centuries.

Our sea, our cradle. The placid Mediterranean.