He has the feeling he’s staring back in time, or at another part of time. And, as he stares, the white, blown carcass of a moon-like fish – a tench – stares back from the reed bed, its ripped flesh waving in a dense current.

Will Eaves – Murmur

She recalled, for the first time in years, she once read something about the shipping lanes of the estuary. Apparently, the main shipping channel between Parkgate on the Dee estuary and the Irish Sea was somewhere around here. For two hundred years it was a busy route; Cromwell supplied his army in Ireland along it and, in 1742, Handel sailed to Dublin from here to attend the first performance of his Messiah. But the sands of the estuary have shifted and now Parkgate was all but land-locked. The memory surprised her as it had been, until this moment, long-forgotten. How come I can remember all that, even the date?

‘Time is doing strange things,’ said the voice in her head.

Excerpt from Swimming Against the Stream, ©Bobby Seal
Picture of the Dee Estuary near Parkgate: a former riverside quay left land-locked by the encroaching marshes, ©Bobby Seal