Deben estuary. 5am Quickly, without fuss, within ten minutes, he has readied the Flood for leaving. It’s dawn, and the tide has risen with a soft shine that’s brighter than the sky. The water seems like a new element, like mercury, unnaturally flat and shimmering. It’s flooding into the creeks and saltmarsh holes and cracks as if the sea is surrounded here by a giant porous verge. This giant rip in the texture of the soft East Anglian soil, gathering in and expelling out, the way all things appear in this part of England.A thin breeze has arrived with the tide, lifting up from the water with the smell of wet salt and, gazing down the length of the channel, he watches the brightness of the sky, above the beckoning sea, filling with wisps of salmon-pink clouds.He tunes in to the shipping forecast at 5:20am. A comforting voice, the voice he’s listened to all his life, even when he was a child.Good morning and now the shipping forecast issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, at 05:05 on the fourteenth of September .
