Towards The Vastness, Camber Sands, East Sussex

I've loved going to the seaside since I was a small child growing up in Scotland. I can hazily remember us as a family going to Portpatrick on the west coast from my hometown of Kilmarnock. An abiding memory is getting changed under a towel, often in the freezing cold. But there was also the more poetic aspect to it all, running towards the vastness of the sky, the seemingly endless sand and above all the blueness (and greenesss and greyness, depending on the ever changing weather) of the sea.
It felt like something, maybe for the first time, that I would never be able to grab hold of completely, something that would always be infinitely bigger than me and I loved it more than any words I could express. It felt overwhelming and brilliant at the same time. Today's image hopefully captures some of that. As soon as I saw this tiny child against the huge expanse I felt instantly transported back to my own childhood. It was as if I was running into my own photograph.
I still love being by the sea - I love it on the wild days, the blue sky days, the grey days, the freezing cold days and the horizontal rain days.
The two extras were also taken on this wonderful stretch of coastline at Camber Sands.
Today's adventure also involved me losing my glasses (yet again) and them being found (yet again) by my brother. On the way back from Camber Sands we stopped at Tenterden for a coffee. At some point I took off my glasses and mislaid them. I retraced my steps to the coffee shop (they hadn't been handed in there) and the bookshop (nope, they weren't there either). My brother decided to revisit the bench where we had supped our coffee and asked the two blokes who were sitting there if they had seen a pair of glasses. Luckily, very luckily, one of them pointed them out on the ground nearby! I've now been given an official warning - I either wear them all the time on a trip out or do not bring them at all. I feel suitably chastened (especially as last time I lost them was on the shingle in Whitstable!).