When we were kids, the journey to my grandma's house each summer seemed to take an age. Packed in a rattly car, wheezing up hills, lurching through towns with no name. We sang to keep safe. There weren't any seat belts in those days.
At the end, a sloping path overgrown with flowers, a rusting iron gate; beyond it a beach, the world of our childhood. I visit it still, when I can - the house, long sold, has grown twice as big, with a brash new terrace and pool, more Dallas than Devon. Below, the wild fuchsia and gate are gone, the slipway is crumbling into the sea, but the rocks remind that mystery is endless. I jump the narrow creek where my uncle mythically once dived for lobsters; climb the cliff to the headland, clutching a crack in the limestone to pull myself up, just as he and my mother did. Gaze out at the bay, remembering.
My grandad is out there still, his ashes strewn by his friends the coastguards. Computers guard the coast now. Gulls scream from their nests in the rocks. Rabbits dart past the whitethorn and gorse of a ruined fort, built to withstand Napoleon. Napoleon never came. Tourists invade every year, if only for a time. When they leave, the headland remains, as it has for 50 million years. The sea stretches quiet and empty.
We can never go back. To those people we know and love who remain in the past. In my mind, I run down that fuchsia-twined path, pull open the rusty old gate, rush down to the waves.
The sea is like time. It has no memory.
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