Druridge Bay

Verily, Druridge Bay in Northumberland is the most beautiful beach in the world, rasped as it is by chilly north sea winds, and bathed in its cold grey waters that deposit faint traces of sea coal, spent razor clam shells and denuded sea urchins.
It laughs at the tiny humans that try to put up windbreaks and exercise their dogs along its length (the dogs just run for it: it's very funny!).
The sea keeps a daily diary of its activities inscribed on the sand between tides, and washes it away again at every turn.
You get a natural facial: your skin is blasted and battered by tiny, stinging sand particles. You get a natural hairdo: the wind plaits, weaves and tangles your hair into a nest of salty string.
If you lie down, the gusts blow sand into your ears.
If you lie down for long enough you will turn into a sand dune yourself, seeded by rough seagrass patrolled by cross little birds, and scattered with desperate colonies of ragwort weighed down with fornicating bees.
The sky is huge and blue... oh no it isn't...
It's cloudy and grey, spitting rain... oh no it isn't...
It's huge and blue, constantly changing: gigantic, a cloud-holder, stretching to Scandinavia where the dog commands are in Danish but people still can't put up a windbreak.
Running on compacted sand, limping across the hard rippled traces of the sea, splashing through the long salty puddles, sitting in the shelter of the wartime concrete blocks sinking into the soft buttery landscape... I was there, it was there, it is there, and it will be there: a place to share atomic particles with nature, to disappear, to not matter, not to matter.
Until the next time, paradise!