The beginning

I’ll be honest. It was a retreat. Not in the sense of turning away and going back, but in the sense of ‘to go on’ a retreat. I recently read this description of a retreat, and thought to borrow it. A retreat is “…a time away in a quiet and secluded place where you can relax.” That, for me, was Mersea Island.

It was still April (2022), just, when I started to move my things into my rented 16th century cottage on Mersea Island. I say started as, although I have few belongings, I also have no car. My previous accommodation, yes the one with the 24/7 cannabis smoke and noisy neighbours, provided all the necessary kitchen equipment, pots, pans, toaster etc etc etc, so I needed only to buy a rice cooker and a frying pan (to call my own and know that it’s clean). 

Moving into a ‘house’, albeit a small, one bedroom, tiny kitchen, house I began to realise just how much I had relied on various items at the other place. One month on and I still haven’t bought all the ‘necessary’ items, including an oven-proof dish for making ‘Cottage Pie’.

And so here I am, on this island called Mersea, just, only just mind, off the British eastern coast and famed for its ‘native’ oysters. This does, however, beg the question as to why here, why Mersea Island?. That decision had nothing to do with Liverpool, The Beatles or Jerry Mardsen (and his pacemakers), that infamous song or the 1965 film ‘Ferry Cross the Mersey’. It’s a different spelling anyway.

Since the age of (roughly) eight, I had been living in the overall Colchester area, and knew Mersea Island was the closest beaches to where I was living. Though, in truth, I rarely went there until much later, when I was a young buck courting (she had a car). Skip through a few years, and I am actually living in Colchester town (due in its future to be a city once more) and I have a car of my own. I am, quite poignantly, also wanting to get into art school. Time permitting I travel the brief nine miles to sketch the boats at Mersea, or wander the sands. For me, beaches are for investigating, not sunbathing. Each to their own.

Forty years later, (during COVID 19 times) I was living in Cambodia (long story) and as Malaysia (where I had been living, previously) was effectively closed to me, and Europe being practically out of bounds due to both COVID 19 and that horrid miscalculation - Brexit, my only bolt-hole was the country which gave me birth, England, Britain (aka UK).

I had never really seen myself as a Colchestrian. I clung dearly onto my heritage of being born in London’s Clapham, so I really, really didn’t want to live back in Colchester. Besides, no-one there was prepared to help me with the necessary and the quite compulsory (at that time) ten days COVID 19 quarantine. So I prevailed upon a friend to enquire if she knew anyone who could let me stay. She did, and I stayed one month on Mersea Island (from June to July 2021) and fell in love with that peaceful, reasonably insular place. On leaving, I vowed that I would return to live there. 

So, here I am, at the beginning of one year on Mersea Island, soaking up the May sunshine and being serenaded by this garden’s bumble bees flitting from tiny blue flowers and almost as tiny white ones, and lulling me into a sense of peace and of horticultural idyll. In many respects this is my ‘retreat’. A time to recuperate from life’s many knocks and it’s buffering.