Flat

Eastney to Farlington marshes

A grey February day, not too cold, not wet, not windy. I should be pleased to be out walking but with the heavy skies, I feel flat. The dull light makes me feel like I’m in a plastic box in the fridge, looking up at the sky like an opaque lid. I’m leftovers from yesterday’s dinner.

I thought the pathetic fallacy was supposed to work the other way, with the weather reflecting my mood, instead I feel my frame of mind is affected by the weather. Perhaps pathetic but a reality.

It’s easy to feel low as I turn the corner from Eastney and walk north up Langstone harbour. The broken-backed Mulberry Harbour sits in the harbour entrance, an early D-Day casualty that isn’t going anywhere. Lord Egremont’s canal to Portsmouth, avoiding the Solent, is a silent brick-built mouth at Milton. The mud flats don’t even glisten in the dull light.

Langstone is Portsmouth’s forgotten harbour. Too shallow for the big boats, it appears as a muddy drain at low tide, but a safe haven for smaller craft when the sea refills it.

Portsmouth’s salt marshes flourished here, there was a salt-making industry at Great Salterns producing sea salt for the Navy’s beef rations. It must have been a wet and wild landscape, filling and draining with each tide, a treacherous terrain for the stranger.

Whatever wildness it held is now gone. If the English gentry’s estates were remodelled on Claude’s European Acadia, with earth-moving by Capability Brown, this stretch of coast is being remodelled on an artist’s impression of a safe, concrete walkway with seating and bug hotels. The hoardings explain the need to protect the land from the rising sea, and the environmental credentials of tons of concrete barriers to keep the human population away from the actual shore. We will be able to promenade in safety and view the mud flats without ever getting our feet wet.

The pre-rusted signs display the cut out silhouettes of the birds that live along the coast but the empty spaces suggest that they are missing, rather than living on the tidal flats below. Brent geese fly in chevrons overhead, mud to grass and back again.

I think my flat mood is about the loss of a chance to connect with this shore, I am reduced to an observer, separate, fractured, alone. The wintering birds will leave in spring, the sun will shine and the harbour fill again but by then I will be further along the coast.

Brent goose