Or whatever the collective noun for seascapes is. Anyway, after having lived by the sea for quite a few years but never painted it, I’m now painting it obsessively, even though I live further from the sea than I’ve ever done. Perverse! Or perhaps it’s a bit easier to process now I’m not faced with the vast sublime spectacle of it every day.

I guess it’s true of other things, that it’s easier to digest them and figure out what they mean to us some time after we were immediately confronted with them. Sometimes a thing is just too big, or too complex for us to get our heads round it, or it brings up difficult feelings that we’re just not ready to process at the time, or maybe we take it for granted and we don’t realise how special it is until it’s gone.

When I lived by the sea I never once took it for granted. Every single time I set eyes on it I thought ‘wow’, it never once lost it’s power to impress and delight me. And it is so big, so unfathomable, so alien, that it can act as a great receptacle for all our thoughts, feelings, ideas and all the other ‘stuff’ that goes on in our heads that we want to chuck at it. It can mean anything we want it to mean; it can be benevolent, healing, terrifying, vengeful, playful, sexy. We talk about it and treat it with the kind of reverence and mysticism that we talk about our gods.

I was less than a minute’s walk from the beach when I lived in Ibiza and the same in Whitstable. At the end of each day I used to wander down and stand on the shore looking out at the dark surface of the water, sometimes glittering with the reflected light of a full moon, sometimes noisy with restless waves stirred by the wind and at other times utterly black and still and silent. I’d say my prayers to it, for want of a better term. I’m not a Christian, nor do I follow any other particular spiritual path, but I felt compelled to fling out a fragment of my self into the water, like a little pebble that went plop. I never knew if anything else heard or acknowledged my words; if it did, great, and if there is no God and we’re just an accident of freak chemical reactions, well, I’d feel compelled to do it anyway.