185 Onshore breeze on Chesil beach (sleep safe and in hi-def sound)

Radio Lento podcast

This onshore breeze. A pleasant one, will not cuff too much against your ears. It'll flutter. Like a dark brown feather quivers, on a current of moving air.

It'll be steady too. As a pleasant onshore breeze is. As the horizon is, from whence it came. Rising, at its centre. And falling away, almost imperceptibly either side of its farthest edges. A constant. And a consistent presence that lets your skin know just how endless the space is. Out there.

A strange thing though. Worth noting. Worth remembering, for next time. How an onshore breeze is unchanging. While it comes from out there, from the wide open endless sea, and while it lands upon the shore just as the incoming waves do, it does no advancing or receding, like the waves do. No hauling back of the shingle. No pulling away making you feel your love is about to be lost only, seconds later, to be found again. No. Because with the onshore breeze, you always know where you are. It's constant. Cool yet convivial. Makes the time spent on the beach feel real. Right. Restorative.

* We took this 30 minute sound photograph on Chesil Beach by Portland last April. Its the second take of the beach from a different location to episode 163 but taken shortly afterwards on the same day. Placing the Lento sound camera pointing directly out to sea, about fifteen yards from the breaking waves, the scene captures not only the steady on-shore breeze, but the deep visceral and spatial sound of the receding waves as they haul back huge quantities of the smooth, very heavy kind of shingle, that this section of Chesil Beach is made of.