This motherhood memoir-cum-nature journal about the connection between women and the sea is bracing and poetic The journalist and ex-poet Charlotte Runcie is the very definition of a thalassophile. Raised in landlocked Hertfordshire, her first real encounter with the sea comes on a childhood holiday to the Isle of Skye. The water is icy, the breeze hard and the clouds low, yet she’s imprinted by the experience as surely as one of Konrad Lorenz’s geese. Or should that be gannets? Because she is left ravenous for more, seeking out its salty swell at every opportunity and lining her pockets with littoral keepsakes: sea glass, cockleshells, desiccated starfish. Her longing only intensifies when, living in Edinburgh and becalmed in a state of extended childhood while her contemporaries net dream jobs or – cliche of cliches – go travelling, she finds herself pregnant, aged 28. Her first thoughts are of all that seems suddenly out of reach. “I wanted to have an adventure. But I’m going to have a baby,” she panics. If she has become a “vessel”, then the coming nine months will turn out to be a voyage in themselves, one whose far-flung itinerary includes ancient Greece and 18th-century shell grottoes and whose manifest runs to monsters of the deep, superstitious sea shanties and Grace Darling – the real Grace Darling, not the saccharine heroine invented by the Victorian media. Continue reading...
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