The Most Impressive Thing I've Ever Seen.

 I was on the beach, getting pummeled by the breakers at the water's edge. It was the first time I'd been in the sea for forty years and it felt amazing. Primal. Huge. Attacked by a ravening beast. I made it in up to my waist, and it repeatedly knocked me on my arse. There was soft, sucking shingle which quickly gave way to slippery, submerged rock, so I never went further than the silt-line. But still, it felt fantastic and I laughed manically as the tide repeatedly shrugged me off. You're powerless in the face of the sea. There's a reason why planet earth is blue - we're Poseidon's bitch. And there's a reason sailors in the past never knew how to swim - there's no point. The sea will just swallow you. It is bigger and more terrifying than anything in nature. Retrieving a rubber brick from the bottom of the pool while wearing your pajamas wont save you from rampaging Tiamat. I'd only breached the sea's white, lacy fringes and it had repeatedly beaten me down. It was thrilling but safe. Jeopardy, with stabilizers. 

I sloped back up the beach, grinning, while a boy and a girl strolled down it. They were accompanied by two large, black dogs and one, large white towel. The couple were, perhaps, in their early twenties. She was blonde, he had dark hair. If you were attempting to advertise a beach, or a new kitchen, or a Toyota Yaris or just about anything really, this would be the couple you'd choose. When she stripped to her bikini you could add Bodyform and 90s hip hop to that list. They were a good looking pair. 

This is not the rock. But it's a bit like it. 

There was a large rock poking out of the sea, making a better job of defying the waves than I had. It looked like granite from the way it was broken up into sharp shelves, and was shark's fin grey. The girl walked into the sea and towards the rock and pulled herself onto it. She found a handhold, then a foothold, and she was up, climbing up its ridges as easily as a spiral staircase, and she was at the top, strolling about the jagged summit in bare feet, thirty feet above the water. 

The wind was up, the breakers crashing. She's mad, I think. To injury-averse people like myself, who have lost teeth to cheese souffles and broken their knees falling down three carpeted steps carrying a box of aluminium stair-rods, to clamber up a giant granite rock, nearly naked, and wander about like it was your hotel balcony, is reckless beyond belief. I was in awe of her. 

Without warning, and quite casually, she back-flipped off the rock and plunged into a shallow pool. She disappeared. There was barely a splash. Fucking hell. The pool was circled by jagged rocks. The seabed was solid rock beyond the skirt of shingle. Fucking hell. 

She reappeared, after an improbably lengthy period of time, seal sleek and not bleeding from the head, and striding up the beach like Botticelli's Venus, minus the big clam. She looked primordial, mythical. She'd done the bravest thing I'd ever seen anyone do, and for no reason. She did it because she could, and because she'd look amazing doing it. It was like something from a film, but a film in which I wouldn't be the protagonist, or the comic relief or even credited at all, unless it was something like "Fat Wet Beach Man With His Mouth Open". The story was elsewhere. The story was all her. As she swam in the sea with her two black dogs, I could see she'd be the star of her own great adventure. And as her boyfriend sat on a towel on the beach, I could tell he'd be written out after the first season.      

Later on we returned to the beach and the tide had gone out. We could see the rock, taller now, and the pool she'd jumped into was ringed by a spiky, stone crown. The jump was even more dangerous than it had appeared. Susan pointed out the girl was probably local and might have been jumping from that rock for years, perhaps since she was a child. And I thought back to my own childhood, and my dad trying to teach me to swim in the municipal pool, and how I'd clung onto him like a spider monkey, screaming, refusing to put my head under the water and how, eventually, he'd given up, and I'd never learned to swim well, though I loved swimming now. I knew I didn't have it in me to leap from that rock. Even before all the damage, before the shattered limbs, I just wasn't brave. It wasn't in me. 

 And I'd never looked that good in a bikini.