Yesterday, I waded out to the point often described as the nearest place on land where one can experience the meeting of two seas – the North Sea (The Atlantic Ocean) and the waters leading toward the Baltic.

I’m not entirely convinced that the claim is as precise as the tourist brochures suggest. Geography has a way of becoming more poetic when it is turned into marketing. But standing there, with the sand shifting under my feet and the water pulling in different directions, it was easy to see that two separate currents were colliding.

The result was strangely beautiful: opposing waves crashing left to right and right to left, into one another, folding and breaking at odd angles, creating patterns on the restless surface. Whether or not the brochure version is entirely accurate, the sensation was real enough as the sea was briefly drawing its own visible border.