Yesterday I anticipated writing a short piece about the sea but instead I dived into it. The sky was clear, the day windless and warm. The beach I drove to, on the bay, is a familiar one: a short, steep incline via steps to reach the sand, biscuit-coloured in the bright sunlight, and from there the sea stretching to the blue horizon. It was more a necessity than a choice to go, to abandon writing about an enticing subject till, well, now. Yesterday I strode into the unusually calm water, up to my waist, and dived in. The experience was bracing. The few other people at the beach were there to sun themselves. Yesterday.  Yesterday, as impossible to reclaim, except via a discernable hangover of longing, as a day four decades ago when I first discovered the beach and swam there—or indeed a day a thousand or thousands of years ago, low waves breaking, the sandstone cliffs looking on as now. Days, mostly, that merge into oblivion. Yesterday there was a freighter on the horizon. Fingerlings darted about in the warm shallows. Where I swam in the clear water—so clear and fresh that once in it you seem to immediately regain a sense of personal clarity—sunlight made restless shapes on the sandy sea floor, jazzy free-form patterns of light. On a much earlier visit, I saw a shark cruising in the water as I looked down from the cliffs. But not yesterday. Gulls, terns, cormorants, yes, both from where I stood in the water and later from where, drying off after my swim, I watched from the beach.

I am not a strong swimmer. Immersion is the thing. Though not when the sea and sand have been churned up after a storm or when there’s a thorough, gloomy covering of cloud and visibility in the water is low. Then I steer clear—with daring exceptions. I want to see a shark before it sees me, even though a determined shark’s swimming ability makes an advance sighting most likely futile. I imagine the fin crisply slicing the surface of the water at some great speed as it approaches me, as on many a daring occasion I’ve speculated a fin might—and forget that the probability of this horror happening is, in round figures, zero. Today it is cloudy, the wind is up, the temperature is down—Melbourne’s see-saw weather—altogether a better day to write about rather than enter the sea.