I go for a walk on Chapman’s Peak Drive, above the bay early on a Saturday morning. I park at the beach and there are the usual joggers, car guards, ecstatic dogs, Cross-Fitters suffering for their art. White and black women roll out mats for free yoga and families tumble like nuclear circuses from Quantums and Quests and Caravelles. The gulls are noisy and selfish, improbably clean, reeling on endless rags of wind and bickering over flotsam. They sound like they always have and so does the sea, so too do the people. You close your eyes and it’s 50 years ago, 150 years from now: here once again on the breathless shore, rallied by scavengers, every living voice caught in the throat of the wind.
A sandy set
of dodgy stairs leads past the public toilets to the road that will lead me
above it all. When I emerge there the
wind whooshes up and rattles my Ray-Bans, with which I am privately engaged in
a materialistic, star-crossed love affair. One day they are doomed to be sat on,
lost or scratched beyond utility; every hour for now of optical UV refuge but a slender concession of niggardly fate.
The cyclists are here in their thousands now, the mountain road is riddled. Up they go tense and crabbed, often engaged in breathless show-off small talk. Descending, they are hunched and Alien-shaped, whizzing past at an alarming speed. The sound they make is fantastic, the whirr of thin tires on asphalt a long aspirated Zzzzzz like the whistles I’d win at boardwalk arcades in Manasquan, New Jersey, circa 1987.
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