A life not remembered

A short while ago, good friends and fellow Prima Donnas keltanen and hannamime posted childhood images of themselves. As a dedicated follower of fashion, naturally I had to do the same.

I wish I could remember more about those days. I was born in Swansea and until the age of four lived on the Gower peninsula. (And although I'm four in the picture, it was actually taken on holiday at Loch Ness in Scotland.)

In theory it should have been an idyllic childhood: a small coastal town with a friendly local community, in an officially designated area of outstanding natural beauty. Family stories of that time are populated by kindly Welsh ladies called Mrs Jones, and feature endless afternoons running along wide, sandy beaches. Alas, I remember no stories for myself, just occasional images.

However, I do get sensory echoes of those times: the salty tang of the smell of the sea, and the plaintive cry of distant seagulls (the word 'plaintive' must surely have been coined specifically for seagulls). Even the primal feeling of unease in the gut as a storm brews somewhere over the water.

There are occasional faint reminders of these in Helsinki. Some seagulls certainly sing the same song. Others, however, are city scavengers that do not provide the same romantic resonance as the ocean-goers circling high overhead. Furthermore, the Baltic Sea, although noble in its own way, is brackish rather than salt. The air is not fully flavoured with the sea in the manner of my childhood.

I don't do watersports and I don't care for hours of roasting on the beach. But for deeper, less explicable reasons, sometimes I feel that, at the heart of my subconscious, I want my seaside back.