Why the water? Part 1, early life

I can hear you simply clamouring to know why it's the water I'm listening to... well, partly it's personal history. I was brought up by the Thames, I swam in it once (an even worse idea then than it is now) and a very early memory is watching the the water bubble and swirl around the stern of a slipper launch in which I was given a ride.

  However, I went to a boarding school, which meant that for nine years I was somewhere else for about two-thirds of the year - right by the sea.

So close you could hear, from the dormitories, the sounds of the sea - the gulls, the breaking waves.

I'm sure the physical environment we experience as children goes deep; otherwise I would certainly find it hard to explain rationally why Eliot's line "the river is within us, the sea is all about us" resonated so powerfully for me when I first came across it at the age of 17 - as it still does. Poems about beaches, seas, rivers, if they're any good, take my ear, as do sea stories. I'm an expert arm-chair sailor.

Many university days were spent within sight of the sea, and on beaches.

For my first job after university I lived on a river and not far from the sea.

But East Anglia wasn't all peaceful estuaries and the sound of waders calling across the saltings. North Sea storms can be fierce and sudden:

After Suffolk I lived by rivers - two Avons:

 And now, I'm

back by the sea.

"The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
             The salt is on the briar rose,
             The fog is in the fir trees."

Those are voices I want to listen to.

We are mostly water, and I read once (?) that tidal difference, the moon's power, can be measured in a glass of water. Perhaps even in our inner waterynesses we have tides. 

My feeling for the land's edge - stream, river, lake, sea, ocean - is inexpressible. Maybe that's just my literary incompetence - but maybe not. 

Just a little shingly beach by a lake in Snowdonia or Cumbria can put me into a different mental state, let alone a walk by an ocean that's getting itself into a rage. 

And of course, I'm not unique in this love for - no, this essential need to seek out -  thin places, watery boundaries.

"Enough already with the pictures," I hear you cry, " so you connect with the water. And?"

But there's more than just my personal history that makes me stop and listen to what the water says. See part 2.