I was walking Hope along the beach, between writing sessions, yesterday. The morning had been unrelenting rain, but sometime over lunch things started to pick up, and by 2pm I was strolling along a near-deserted beach in my lovely red fur-lined wellies, looking at this.

I don’t often wish that my life was different, but right then I wished I was an artist.

I thought about how I would love to be able to capture what I was seeing.

I wondered how many shades of blue I would need. How I would manage to make the breakers move across the canvas. I wondered about oils, or watercolours, or guache, or even a charcoal sketch that would, somehow, create a sense of blue.

I considered how I would want to make sure I got both the mist on the horizon and the clarity of the clouds, beating their wings like a vast eagle in the sky. And how the light would need to make it clear that this was an autumn beach, cold as well as bright. I thought about how amazing it would be to be able to bring this moment to life in another way, and how it would then be held forever.

And then I remembered that I don’t paint. So I walked on, and I ‘just’ enjoyed the view. Except that that ‘just’ was more than enough.