Jew World Order

When we were children, my father used to march us to the cliffs above Bournemouth beach and instruct us to fill our lungs with good sea air.

At the time, it seemed a bit of a palaver. But I’m pleased to say science has vindicated my dad’s habit.

This week, researchers at the University of Exeter released the results of a study that proves the sea is good for you. All those ‘Skegness is SO bracing’ posters? They were right after all.

The study found that people living by the sea enjoy higher than average rates of good physical health and that they also suffer much less stress than those living inland.

But we British don’t need a survey to tell us that living by the seaside, or even just visiting, is a tonic. Ever since the Georgians began the fashion for sea-bathing, the notion of its health-giving properties has been assured.

Here in Southampton, where I live (and swim in the sea every day of the year), the beach was a fashionable promenade for royalty and aristocracy encouraged by their doctors to take the air and even plunge into the water.

‘On entering the sea, the head should be instantaneously immersed, the eyes kept closed, as, without this practice be strictly adhered to, no fair trial of the effects of sea bathing can be made,’ the Hampshire Chronicle advised in 1798.

Queen Victoria carried on the tradition across the Solent, on her private beach at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight – which this week was opened to the public.

There, her huge family could enjoy the benefits of the breezy outlook, though Her Majesty admitted ‘I thought I should be stifled’ by immersion.

Around this time, Herman Melville observed in Moby-Dick – my favourite book – how humanity appeared spiritually attuned to the sea.

Go to any seaside city on a Sunday afternoon, he wrote: ‘What do you see? Posted like silent sentinels stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries.

Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in.’

We’re the same today. We are magnetically drawn to the water, to roll up our trousers or hitch up our skirts and paddle.

To skip stones over the waves. To sail or swim or canoe – anything to make that great connection between us and the sea.

Why? Well, one reason may be that the sea is where we came from – as did all life on Earth. But more recently, relatively speaking, perhaps early humans owed their very development to the sea.

In a controversial theory from the early Eighties, the writer and scientist Elaine Morgan investigated the notion that we were once ‘aquatic apes’, and it gained acceptance among zoologists such as Desmond Morris.

The theory has been revived by scientists such as Dr Callum Roberts of the University of York, who, in his recent book, Ocean Of Life, noted that the ratio of subcutaneous fat in humans is ten times that of other primates – in fact, nearer to that of a whale.

From an evolutionary point of view, human blubber would make little sense if we were land hunters. But it would be eminently useful for an ‘aquatic ape’, which developed by the sea.

Equally, we can’t fly or even run as fast as other animals, and we lack body hair to keep us warm, but we can swim and dive – skills that would not make sense, some say, unless we were made for, or at least shaped by, the water.

The idea is that rather than descending from the trees to hunt on the savannah all those millennia ago, we gravitated to the shore.

Indeed, new evidence suggests that a diet sourced from the ocean may have provided the essential fatty acids – Omega 3 and 6 – that enabled our brains to grow larger than those of other mammals. It also suggests we stood up to wade like birds as we scavenged for shellfish on the shores of our earliest home in southern Africa.

Other factors seem to support the argument: we are prone to dehydration, and we exhibit an instinctual breath-holding reaction when we plunge into water – in contrast to other terrestrial mammals, which can’t regulate reflex breathing.

Some scientists – such as Belgian anthropologist Marc Verhagen – argue that our wide shoulders are more suited to swimming than running, and we might owe our long legs and long strides to ancestors who foraged in the shallows for at least some part of our evolution.

Could this be why we stood up on two legs in the first place?

While some scientists dismiss these ideas, the notion we owe our development and intelligence, maybe even our spiritual longing, to this early life by the sea, is alluring.

Perhaps this is why so many of our myths and legends are associated with the water. In a fascinating new book, The Fabled Coast, Sophia Kingshill and Jennifer Westwood have assembled some of the most intriguing such stories from around the shores of Britain and Ireland – tales of mermaids and sea serpents, of smugglers and wreckers.

There are ‘soul-birds’ – petrels and seagulls said to embody the spirits of drowned sailors – and real heroes such as Sir Francis Drake, whose legend was so powerful that it was believed he was reincarnated as Admiral Nelson and even Captain Frederick Walker, who led an anti-submarine escort in World War II.

The sea so easily throws up such stories – partly because of the characters of the people who live by it. In my travels as a writer fascinated by the sea, I’ve come across many who share my obsession.

‘Even in this soggy summer, the sea draws us to its shores. It is our last wilderness, where our gaze – so limited to computer screens and TVs in everyday life – can stretch to the endless horizon’

People such as the artist Angela Cockayne, who scours the beach of the Cornish fishing village of Port Isaac for strange materials – assembling constructions from dead gannets and Coca-Cola bottles that look like sea monsters.

Or my friend ‘Stormy’ Mayo, who hails from Cape Cod in New England, where his family reaches back to 1650. For generations the Mayos have fished the Atlantic – Stormy’s father even hunted whales. Now, Dr Charles Mayo, to give him his proper name, spends his time as a scientist out at sea, observing whales in order to conserve them.

Meanwhile, his son Josiah catches fish and lobsters in the bay.

Or I think of Tobie Charlton, whose day job is repairing and servicing bicycles, but who drops everything at any spare moment to windsurf on the nearest beach. He lives for the sea, like so many others I know.

The world is full of such people – and nowhere more so than in this island nation of ours.

Yet another report says there is a 33 per cent increase in the risk of suicide among populations living 2,000m above sea level. The assumption is that this is due to the fact thin air exacerbates mood disorders.

Equally, negative ions produced by the sea improve our mood.

Even in this soggy summer, the sea draws us to its shores. It is our last wilderness, where our gaze – so limited to computer screens and TVs in everyday life – can stretch to the endless horizon.

A place where we feel free. A place of adventure, possibilities and childhood nostalgia.

Whatever the weather, we’ll promenade along the beach, stake our windscreens in the sand and get out the Thermos, determined to make the most of Britain’s greatest asset – its beautiful, resplendent and, yes, health-giving seaside.