Ink-blue water
As the logos on this website testify, I’m an ink-geek, and love inky similes. Here is another one, about the sky rather than the sea.  A small breeze sent up a flurry over all the ink-blue water. Source: Louis Golding, Good-bye to Ithaca (London: Hutchinson,...
As fabulous as …
A marvelously original simile for ‘fabulous’, found in this slim, exquisitely written book by Saint-Exupery. Something resonant in that phrase, the ‘immensity of the sea’, particularly as a description of expanding a boy’s mind through...
Hare-bell sea
A lyrical description of the Greek island of Thera, bursting with flowers and trees, and all sloping down to a soft lilac-tinged blue sea. But there is a delicate order, too, imposed by tracery of asphodel and grape-hyacinth, purple mallow and coppery dandelion, by...
Folded in
Something about this loose, large mixing of sky into sea that evokes a huge basin in which a celestial cake of light, air and water is being made.  I arrive late one night beneath a loose black sky lazily folded into the sea. Source: Justin Marozzi, The Man Who...
Who needs maps?
Here is a long winded anecdote, no doubt embellished in the re-telling, which you can stash away in your own postprandial story-store. And feel free, if you tell it yourself, to further embellish it.  I thought about recording an audio version, but can’t bring...
Sheer from the sea
In 1916, in the middle of the First World War, Louis Golding sailed passed Ithaca. Minds were on other things than Homer and Odysseus, but this evocative statement about the island, uttered by a sailor on the boat deck, must have contributed to his long-delayed but...
Poems for my family 004 – Durrell
Listening time: under 5 minutes. Durrell has long been a favourite writer and poet. When I first read his Alexandria Quartet in my twenties, I went back to the beginning and started again, something I’ve only ever done for one other book (The Tale of Genji). I...
Fish-haunted seas
Loved this sense of ichthyo-abundance in seas now widely depleted of fish stocks. And the idea of a gift for a goddess after you have bridged the Bosphorus.May the coming decades see our seas newly shoal-packed and species-dense. I am trying to eat less fish and only...
Sea the colour
I love different ways of describing eyes, and colours, and this one allows some range in its definition. Blue or grey or green, or somewhere on that spectrum? ‘Eyes the colour of the North Sea in February…’For further eye colour quotes, meet other...
Peat-dark waves
A description of wild swans floating on the night sea. I like that Maxwell uses peat, a local material, to describe the nocturnal waves. ‘All through the night I heard their restless murmur as they floated light as spume upon the peat-dark waves.’Â Â ...
Tide-swayed fronds
An otter’s eye view of the world, with its human connections and its human-free watery paradise. Maxwell’s classic account of his relationship with otters confirms many of the admirable and adorable aspects of the animal described in Williamson’s...
Frogs around a pond
I liked Socrates’ image of the Mediterranean, that great big watery basin, as a pond around which we live like frogs. ‘We live round a sea,’ Socrates had told his Athenian friends, ‘like frogs round a pond.’Â Â Source: Quoted in...
