“If golf is a good walk spoiled, water is a good walk improved”

Be it lake, pond or the German Ocean, there is no walk that doesn’t get better if you just add water……

THERE AREN’T MANY moments in my life when a line of poetry isn’t on the verge of blooming in my head. Oddly, given how I’ve made a goodly chunk of my living, this happens more often even than with pop lyrics. Maybe because between the ages of about thirteen and twenty, you were as likely to find me with my head in a poetry anthology as you were in pair of headphones.

This weekend, as often, it was a poem of Larkin’s called Water. It begins: “If I were called in to construct a religion, I should make use of water.” I get where he’s coming from. Other people might replace that word ‘religion’ with ‘golf course’ or ‘theme park’ or ‘garden feature’. I would put ‘walk’ there though. If golf is a good walk spoiled, water is a good walk improved.

It doesn’t even have to be a walk. With the AA Book of the Road on my lap in my role as navigator, I am notorious for surreptitiously and, on the dubious grounds that it is ‘probably quicker than the main road at this time of day’, dragging us out of our way so that I can take us by that little irregular blob of blue I’ve just spotted. I will detour for duck ponds. I will deviate for lakes. I will even sidetrack for ornamental ponds, at a pinch.

Last week, headed north-easterly, I tried to engineer a detour via Calke Abbey, less for any burning enthusiasm in ecclesiastical history than because it was situated on one of those alluring blue smudges. I didn’t in the end, but it didn’t matter as I was soon to get my fill of the not-so-hard stuff. Little Haven is the bit of South Shields right on the waters of the Tyne and the North Sea where North-Easterners once took holidays, in the days before Magaluf was as accessible as Morpeth. I stayed there after a show I’d done at the town’s lovely Customs House theatre and marvelled that there are bits of Britain like this hiding in plain sight on the map known only to locals.

The art deco frontage faces the vast glittering expanse of blue where the broad, silky, muscular Tyne meets the North Sea, two great piers arching their arms into the briny to welcome the little fishing boats home into their arms like weary, wobbling toddlers. The water buzzes from morning till night; tugs, smacks, ferries and the odd giant car transporter, gliding by like the size of a space cruiser in a sci-fi film.

Hear Stuart on Radcliffe and Maconie, BBC 6 Music, 1pm to 4pm Monday to Friday.

The Littlehaven Hotel sits pretty much on the beach, though I am loathe to give its name even to you, dear reader, as it is one of those quirky, lovely places you are tempted to keep to yourself. At evening, as the spring sun started to dip and slant across mirrored water, we strolled the half an hour along the sand and shingle. In time we reached Colman’s Seafood Temple, a former ruined bandstand and public toilet which has been turned into the fish & chip shop of the angels, where you can have elderflower gin, scallops and mushy pea fritters and watch the sun go down.

Wandering back, the air had turned clear and chilly but it was still worth a walk along the long groyne to the lighthouse. Here we looked out over the huge grey stretch of water that was known as the German Ocean until World War I, when it changed to the North Sea in the same way as the Saxe-Coburgs became the Windsors.

Water had worked its magic again, turning a working weekend into a holiday. The salt air had made me tired and hungry and happy in the way only the seaside can. I will still always look for those blue smudges on the map. Yes, Mr Larkin, I agree. If I were called in to construct a walk, I should make use of water.