Last week, we walked on Chesil Beach. We felt its steepness. Its shingle. Its sound. We heard its heavy waves. The way the stones are heaved back, in long, ground rumbling sweeps. A wild, brazen place.

A bird, wheeling high above, must see Chesil Beach as an endless grey white line spanning from one end of the visible horizon, to the other. From the coast road it looks like a white raging line. The Jurassic south coast of England. Unmoveable land meets unstoppable sea.

But as a person sat, hunkered down on a bed of golfball-sized smoothly rounded stones. Coat pulled up against the cuffing onshore breeze just a few yards from the fizzing shoreline. You feel that between the to and fro of the crashing waves, there is a kind of softness to Chesil Beach.

A kind of hidden tenderness. A feeling made from time, and the way the frothing water delicately stills, and settles. Stills, and settles. Forms, and dissolves. Endlessly. Breaking waves, upon meek wetted stones.