Few things have cheered me so much recently as the stuff about the tides. I really get terribly, inordinately excited about it all. Finally, after, gosh I don't know how long we've been waiting, the country has come up with an idea which is neither pettifogging, grossly illiberal nor that thing that's not so much recycling as reflux, the return of (say) curried onions, which frankly weren't that wild a success first time round on the way down. We are going to employ the sea. Create, it is hoped, up to 20 per cent of our electricity through tidal power. That won't, probably, quite happen, because someone rich will spoil it; but the idea's there, actually the machines are there, going into the sea over the next decade, and one thing about it all is that it is, actually, sexy.
My green credentials are an odd shade of green: toad-slimy, I'd say. The flesh is potentially willing but the spirit is weak, because none of it makes much sense or is much fun, and I don't even pretend to begin to understand the argument over air miles - they're flying anyway, and my not getting on them's not going to make them not fly. My scientific credentials are even worse. I remember, as a child, pestering my parents about why I might not accidentally split an atom while slicing through butter. I stopped asking not because I finally understood but because my father finally told me to stop asking - the one off-moment in an otherwise happy 45th birthday.
But I do know that tidal power, grey beasts of turbines, fat salted propellers hanging deep off our coasts and quietly churning, is, to my mind, incredibly romantic, and also the power will thus be rather free; the magic credit card, the self-replenishing pint. They will look sexy off our shores, with lighthouse-type nubbins sticking up above, romantically, maybe if we get lucky featuring Mansard roofs, or campaniles, or caryatids - not a good look, admittedly, if all involved together, but something distinctive, please, not Eighties Tesco - and we can be proud, and British, and gaze to sea, and think of time and ingenuity.
The mystery, as in so much of my life these days, is why it's taken so long to realise it. Tides rule our lives. More, even, than the sea, by which we defined ourselves for so many centuries. The sea was just the top of it, the thing we sailed over to get to food or silk, or kill people. Tides are what run us, in this country; shift our personalities, rub away beneath at our egos, sweep us away. An island nation, yes, but when we go to the seaside we are not really thinking of the surface water: the sweet, unreliable white ruffles, ready to turn howling harpies with the wrong wind, or the sinister dark-blue birthmarks capping deep cold. We are thinking, even though we might not always know it, of what lies beneath. We are still a land ruled by tides.
Certainly, that surface water has got a little more... splashy in recent years. We are, apparently, less afraid of our emotions than we used to be: we cry on telly, and shout about our ambitions, but, actually, that's just the morons. Most of us, still the vast majority, are pulled and battered and bedevilled and made good by subterranean tides, silent and deep. We marry not because of the froth but because of something pulling at our feet 60 fathoms down, leading us in a quiet direction. We stop doing the things which will ruin us, because we can feel, 50 miles away but still swirling fast from there, a savage eddy; or we don't stop doing them because we're treading water and sense nothing but salt tears. We make our daily decisions according not so much to the positions we're in, the clothes we wear, the surface, but to the tides which brought us to this place, and which will sweep round, one day, once more. That's what tides do.
I will marvel, when the sexy tidal power starts. Try, once more, to work it all out. Sit, gazing, with a little bible of tide-tables, think of the turbines beneath, try once more to get my head around the mutual moon-earth gravitational dance, perhaps even cleverly and scientifically succeed this time (but still cut my butter with care). Try, if I get foolishly ambitious, to make sense, even, of some of the personal tides which have guided me, brought me to this place. Undercurrents, bad ankle-suckers, which have had me stumbling for miles, years, up the wrong coast. Neither waving nor drowning: or, at least, if either, then they were stupidly simultaneous. That's the Stevie Smith line most quoted; but its immediate predecessor has always had more resonance. I was, as it happened, always much further out than I thought.
