How do you describe the sea?

It is blue, but also not blue at all. Sometimes it appears every colour but: lavender, charcoal, bottle-green, slate. Trick-playing, adjective-defying.

I am walking a stretch of the Kent coast, the wind clawing at my face on an otherwise muggy summer’s day. To my right, the Channel, to my left, a golf course designed around clumps of heathland. Even in the wind, golfers are undeterred. There is a Trunchbullian figure in stockings marching between holes. Someone is flying a drone over the course, while two idling men in pastel polos trail behind self-drive caddies. Golf has come a long way.

It may be windy but the sea is calm, barely troubled at all. There is no cresting foam, no white-tipped waves. Instead, it rises and falls gently as if it is breathing, quietly running its fingers into the shingle, and dragging them back again.

A beautiful cinnabar moth lands near my feet. Its black and scarlet wings remind me of the markings on a poisonous tropical frog. It stays there, unmoving, as if we are staring each other out, waiting for the other to move. Unlike this human, the insect is helpless in the wind. If he takes off, he risks deportation. How many of them have expected to land on a ragwort flower but ended up in France, twenty-odd miles away? Perhaps as many moths are blown off-course here as golf balls.

I squint but cannot see France across the Channel, the pale line of cliffs lost in the summer haze. But I can make out the spinning white blades of wind turbines far out at sea, and a blue-sailed yacht – like that of a child’s drawing – trails along the horizon. Above us, long, indecisive clouds of grey recline through the sky. Only occasionally do they let clear, pure sunshine stream through and drench everything with colour. Purple thistles and the last yellow flowers of gorse, the pale-pink shards of whelk and oyster shells on the beach. Sweat gleams on my neck and forehand. It is hot, mildly uncomfortable, and then the sun is hidden again. The moth has gone.

There are huge, lonely early-twentieth-century houses up ahead, worth millions of pounds unless they’ve been portioned into flats, in which case they are still worth a lot of money because this is Kent, and we are on the coast. They look like doll’s houses, with chimneys and lawns and great, white-framed bay windows that look out to sea.

Even in death, people want to be near the sea, as though it offers somewhere ephemeral but permanent for our souls to linger. Back near where I’d left my car, there were oxidised plaques along the sea wall commemorating loved ones. Benches carved with names and messages about how they “loved it here”. Sometimes there was a limp teddy bear or bunch of artificial flowers tied to the armrest – perhaps relatives had grown so tired of buying fresh roses each week that they’d just settled for a time-saving bouquet of plastic blooms instead, even if it did mean the polyester petals would slowly fade in the light.

The whole path was lined with benches, so many places to sit and watch the sea, that eventually I stopped reading all the inscriptions. But there was one bench that struck me. It was dedicated to a beloved mother and grandmother called Annie, who “would have loved it here”.

I wondered. Would have. Had she never known this spot in her lifetime? Did she live far away? Did her relatives come here and think of her and how much she’d enjoy the views if she came and visited, but never got the chance?

Annie was, perhaps, a thalassophile. One who loves the sea. She was not alone, of course, and I have often wondered why we find ourselves so lured to the sea. Humans are not natural-born swimmers. Not for millions of years have we had a home in the ocean, back when a fish one day attempted to crawl on land and became an amphibian. And there is all manner of entities that could maim, drown or eat us out there. Physical logic compels us to not enter the sea.

And for years I was terrified of going in the sea, haunted by an experience on holiday as a child. Panic, lack of control, feet unable to feel the ground beneath me.

But even then, things felt in order when the sea was in sight. Things felt complete, like I had some oversight of both land and sea, the two realms of our world. There was, still is, a thrill to smelling its perfume, and now, standing here, I cannot keep my eyes from it: the sheer size and simplicity of it, the silent majesty, the way it rises and falls if guided by a conductor’s hand. The periwinkle blue, the lilac, the flashes of copper and seafoam green. As far as my eyes can I see there is water, melting into the sky in the distance, the same water that wraps most of this planet, its lightless depths full of mysteries most of us will never comprehend. Somewhere out there it is raging and white, furious, tossing boats like juggling balls, and somewhere else it is warm and shallow, as clear as glass. Minutes and hours feel trivial when with the sea, because time is measured only by tides, whose ceaseless, gentle song seems to call your name.

If there is a biological impulse to be near the sea – to see, hear, smell, touch and taste it – then it is hard to disentangle this from the romance we have given it over the years. The beauty of an ocean sunset, the promise of adventure and discovery waiting on the horizon, the way it offers a simple antidote to the frivolity of modern life. Even when we are not near the sea, we seem to crave its soothing presence: an eleven-hour video of ocean sounds has over sixty-two million views on YouTube. There is clearly something. Annie must have known this, wherever in the world she was. She must have felt that same pull, to stand as I am now, watching – being near – the sea, trying to find a way to describe it all and never able to do it justice.

Something has spooked the flock of herring gulls down at the shoreline. There are fifteen, twenty of them, including this year’s speckled juveniles, and they swoop into the air as V-shaped missiles. They squawk and yelp, and attempt to steer themselves through the breeze, but they are forced downwards by the wall of wind and finally settle on the water, the teal sea slowly heaving beneath them.

A sudden burst of sunshine. I look out and watch the water faintly sparkle, all turquoise and gold leaf, everything is different, and then the clouds return and the sea changes again.

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