Thirty-Eight Years of Low Tide

The sea here leaves twice a day

You have to understand the tide first, because the tide is the whole personality of the place. Thorpe Bay sits at the eastern end of Southend-on-Sea, where the Thames finally gives up being a river and becomes the sea, and the water goes out roughly a mile at low tide. Not a poetic mile. An actual mile of glistening grey-brown mud and sand, drained twice daily like someone pulled a plug, leaving boats leaning on their keels at drunken angles and a smell I will never be able to describe to anyone who hasn't stood in it: weed and salt and diesel and something older underneath, the estuary's own breath.

To visitors it looks like the sea has been cancelled. To us it was a schedule. The tide going out meant the walk to the Mulberry Harbour was open, and you learned the rules the way you learn anything serious as a kid, from adults saying it with their eyes slightly wide: start an hour before low water, watch the time, because the sea comes back faster than you think, and the lifeboat crew spends a depressing amount of every summer collecting people who didn't believe that. Standing at the caisson with the shore reduced to a thin line behind you is the closest thing my childhood had to the surface of the moon.

Then the water would come home, and so would we, usually via the Three Shells for donuts. Hot, dredged in sugar, handed over in a paper bag that went translucent with grease before you'd made it back to the seawall. I have eaten fancier things in restaurants I can't remember the names of. I remember every single one of those donuts.

At some point the council lined the seafront with palm trees, and I want it on record that an entire town spent that summer taking the mick out of them, palm trees shivering in an Essex wind under a sky the colour of dishwater, and I also want it on record that we all secretly loved them. That's the local dialect: affection, disguised as abuse. Hold that thought, because it comes back later.

Runner-up at the Lawn Tennis Club

I learned to ride a bike along Thorpe Bay Gardens, the wide stretch of green between the big houses and the sea, my dad's hand on the saddle and then, in the classic betrayal, not on the saddle. I can still feel the exact wobble of that first unassisted run, the grass on one side, the estuary on the other, the whole flat enormous sky doing nothing to break my fall. Nobody's first solo ride happens anywhere better.

A few years later, most of my life ran through Thorpe Bay Lawn Tennis Club. I want to be honest with you about my record there, because this is a goodbye letter and goodbye letters shouldn't lie. I have a shelf of trophies from that club, and nearly all of them say runner-up. Year after year I would fight my way through the draw, arrive at the final, and lose to someone, frequently the same someone, with a politeness that would have made my gran proud. One or two say winner. I could tell you about those two for hours. The runners-up taught me more.

Because here's what a childhood of coming second at a small tennis club by the sea actually gives you: you learn to lose in front of people you'll see at the clubhouse every week for the rest of your life, and then come back Tuesday and train anyway. There's no slinking off. The kid who beat you is there, his mum is there, the man who runs the bar saw the whole thing. You develop a relationship with losing that is almost domestic. I've since watched talented people fall apart at the first real rejection of their adult lives and thought, with real gratitude, you needed a shelf of runner-up trophies and nobody ever gave you one.

Fridays, when it rained or when it didn't, there was Roller City, all flashing lights and rented skates and the specific terror of the speed round, an entire generation of Southend kids orbiting a dark room to chart music, falling over in front of people they fancied. I was never good at that either. I went every week.

The white house in the postcards

My grandparents lived in the white house opposite Clifftown park, and I need you to understand that this is not a figure of speech: it's the white house in the postcards. The actual seafront postcard racks, the ones spinning outside the gift shops, sold pictures of the cliff gardens with my gran's lounge window in them. As a kid I thought this was completely normal. You'd be walking along the front and there would be a rack of postcards containing, essentially, my grandparents' net curtains, on sale to strangers for pennies.

That house was Sunday afternoons. It was the good biscuits. It was my grandad holding my hand down the cliff paths to the seafront and Peter Pan's, back when Adventure Island was still Peter Pan's Playground, and standing at the fence for what must have been hours while I went round the same small ride again and again, his patience apparently geological. Grandparents at a seaside amusement park exist in a particular register of happiness: they're not there for the rides, they're there to watch your face, and they'd have paid the entry fee just for that.

When I picture Thorpe Bay from where I live now, I picture it from that lounge window, which is to say I picture it the way the postcards do. It turns out the postcards were right all along.

My dad cannot stop buying boats

Every family has one sentence that explains it. Ours is: Dad's bought another boat.

He buys one every other year, roughly, and he cannot make his mind up, and I say that with total love because the indecision is the hobby. Dinghies, day boats, something with a cabin he swore we'd sleep in and we never once slept in. Each one arrived with a speech about how this was the one, and each speech was delivered with the sincerity of a man who had given the identical speech two years earlier on the same driveway. My mum stopped reacting somewhere around boat four. The boats were never really about boats. They were about the fact that we lived somewhere you could have a boat, on water that behaved like a puzzle, and he wanted to be out on it, and he wanted me out there with him.

So I learned the estuary from a small boat with my dad: reading the wind off the water's surface, respecting the tide because out there the tide is not scenery, it's the entire game, and mostly just being quietly alongside him for hours in the way that men of his generation found easiest to do with a tiller in one hand. I couldn't tell you which boat we were on for my favourite memories. There were too many boats. That, I've realised, was the point of all of them.

Leaving. The heartbreak. The necessity.

What I miss most, from the far side of leaving, is the humour, and I need to be careful here because the humour I grew up in does not travel well. It is, by the standards of anywhere I've lived since, extremely offensive. Your mates greet you with an insult calibrated precisely to your weakest point. Affection is measured in abuse; the more someone loves you, the more appalling they are to you, and the correct response to real tragedy is a joke arriving faster than the ambulance. I've tried to explain this abroad and watched faces do the thing where politeness fights confusion. What they can't see is the contract underneath: nobody roasts you like that unless they'd also drive to Stansted at 4am for you without being asked. I have never felt as loved anywhere as I did being told, weekly, at the tennis club and the pub and my own kitchen, exactly what was wrong with me.

I left in 2025. It was necessary, and I won't relitigate the reasons here, because they were the sensible kind, the kind you can defend in any conversation, the kind that look excellent written down. Necessity is strange like that. It wins every argument and still leaves you standing in an empty house you've known for thirty-eight years, listening to how loud a room becomes when it's just walls again.

Nobody warns you that you don't say goodbye to a place once. You say it over and over, in instalments. To the seafront on the last drive along it. To the mud smell, which hit me on that final morning like it knew. To the tennis club noticeboard with names on it I've known since I was eight. And then you keep saying it after you've gone, at random, in a supermarket on another continent when something curdles the air into almost-that-smell and your chest does something embarrassing in the dairy aisle.

Here's where I've landed, for now. Twice a day, every day of my life, I watched the sea leave Thorpe Bay. A mile out, gone, the whole bay drained to the horizon. And twice a day it came back, every time, without exception, for thirty-eight years and for eighty years around that broken concrete church in the mud, which is still there, still waiting, still touchable if you start walking an hour before low water. The leaving was never the end of the story. It was half of a rhythm.

There's an app that tells me the tide times for Southend. I check it more often than I'd admit to anyone back home, who would, quite rightly, destroy me for it. As I write this sentence, the water there is going out. You know what it does next.