For many of us, the summer holidays mean the sea: picnics behind the windbreak, pork pies and crisps and orange squash; wet swimming costumes dragged off under a blowing towel; the easing of gritty feet back into sandals and the ritual shaking of sand from the tartan rug

Within the next few weeks – though, perhaps unwisely, I haven’t booked – I will pack my knapsack, lock my door and run away to the sea. A number 12 bus will take me there, and as soon as I arrive I will throw down my luggage, climb up through the woods and crest the hill to gaze on the great wide blue water that frames Michel Dean, at the end of the Seven Sisters in East Sussex.

With luck, there will be a boat on it: a small white sailing boat, like an exclamation of joy, or a fishing boat with its tattered black marking flags, scrappy but busy. Neither will appear to move on the scarcely rippling calm. I’ve been here in many seasons, including fog and savage cold in which the sea swelled grey like a bruise; I have been here in storms so wild that the whole bowl of sea seemed to froth up like boiling milk. In summer, though, I shall expect it to be lapis lazuli blue beneath the sky, hardly bothered by cloud shadows. I shall sit on the slope with my sandwich and my notebook, and gaze with something very like love.