PHILL JUPITUS

Longpier.com is delighted to welcome comedian and actor Phill Jupitus to the site.  His love of music is well known, but how many people know about his passion for the area he lives in? The Leigh on Sea resident gives us a taster in the first of his regular contributions.

Father Thames, Mother Nature

Those of you who live on the more ‘abrupt’ sections of the British coastline, can’t have the same languorous appreciation for the coming and going of the sea as we do on the East Coast, and especially here on the Thames Estuary. Most of you are surely more accustomed to the sea going up and down. I remember sitting eating fish & chips at St. Ives harbour in Cornwall, patiently waiting for there to be enough water to displace the various boats slumped at odd dry angles on the sand by the quay.

But here on the North Shore of the Thames our tide doesn’t rise and fall as much as it goes away and comes back, like an old dog. It flows idly from us as we sit hunched together on the diminishing ribbon of sand which magically appears every May at Leigh-on-Sea, sticky rivulets of Rossis ice cream dribbling down our knuckles. It is that mute sense of abandonment that we have grown accustomed to through our many years of watching the briny rhythms playing out in front of our eyes.

But at the same time, we are assured in our knowledge that it will come back again. The changing landscape viewed from the clay escarpment that runs from Laindon Hills to east of Southend provides us all with an infinitely shifting vista. We are reminded that this is the river that Charles Dickens characterised as a “low lead line”.

Local folklore abounds with tales of unhappy souls who wandered too far out to the furthest reach of the tide ony to discover that it comes back in at quite a lick. As a child I was warned to avoid walking too far out in the slimy mud at low tide, in case I strayed into ‘London Clay’. To the children of Essex, it was one way to a certain, salty and sticky death to become mired in it’s clutches. But now I’m 47 with kids of my own, I occasionally look out, whatever the tide, whatever the weather and am comforted by the simple beauty of it. Something we don’t do enough.

You can follow Phill on his Twitter feed here