The River Ter descends the Spanish side of the Pyrenees and into the Meditteranean. Its estuary is green and swampy. A magnificent sandy beach arcs, suspended between marsh and sea. At one end of this bay is the pleasant town of Estartit, favoured by people in Austin Montegos. At the other is the small holiday resort of Pals. The sand stretches six miles from Pals to Estartit and, as access is difficult, from the marsh between, if you start either end and walk, you will always find secluded beach, even in the Costa Brava summer. Wading the river mouth, you can walk alone from Estartit to Pals.
Or run. On Saturday, my parents, who had a flat at Pals, drove me to Estartit and left me to run back along the beach. It was like exercising a dog.
This was the hour before sundown: cold and clear. The sea was calm and the sky blue, and I ran barefoot where the waves lap and the sand is firm. I was soon away from the handful of early holidaymakers. I noticed what looked like fragments of smashed glass on the sand ahead, glinting in the evening sun. Miscalculating, I trod on a couple. I felt nothing. Testing some more underfoot, I found them soft between my toes. I stopped to inspect.
These were tiny bits of jellyfish. Round droplets of clear gel, there must have been hundreds. Resuming my run, I encountered more and more. For the whole six miles I was treading a cloth of diamonds. They were in the sea, too. It was like porridge, thick with them. Discarding the theory that they were fragments from bigger jellyfish, smashed in a storm, I speculated that these round, even droplets were babies: tens of tons floating in the bay. The receding tide was leaving a sparkling brocade. How many millions?
When you run, your blood races too, and so do your thoughts. I am sure other runners have experienced this. Perhaps some kind of a drug is released, for the feeling is like that triggered by cocaine: it is of boundless mental energy. You seem to be surfing on a wave of intellectual aggression. All kinds of ideas and projects push through your mind. Suddenly, I was seized with an enormous curiosity concerning jellyfish. I wanted the answers to a hundred questions.
Where do jellyfish come from? What do they eat? Do they like river estuaries? What preys upon them? How do they reproduce? How long do they live and why do they ever die? Can they think? Can they act? How do their bodies function? Are they composed of water, and by what gelatinous compound do they cohere? Can they see? Hear? Experience pain or pleasure? How have they evolved? Are they related to octopus or squid? Where are they found? Are there different types? How many? How many jellyfish are there in the whole world?
With an intensity which took me by surprise, I longed to know everything about jellyfish. I remembered being seized as a boy with the ambition to be a complete expert on tadpoles; later, moths and butterflies; then ferns; then trees. I remembered hearing an old man called Mr Reynolds who was the world's greatest expert on aloes so much so that Mbabane, Swaziland, where he lived, was called "Reynoldsville" by aloe-fanciers everywhere and admiring him.
I was running faster and faster, racing the wind, racing my own thoughts. I had an idea for a book describing those living things which feed off our poisons and depend upon human environmental pollution; and another idea for a television series about Japanese gadgetry. I started planning for a trip to Bolivia this summer, and wondered about writing a book on the Mapiri trail over the Andes. I wondered about a TV documentary on the tin mines at Potosi. I thought about an offer I've had to go
to Antarctica. I wondered about living for a year on the South Indian Ocean island of Kerguelen; a childhood dream. I also wished to go to the Moon. Or shall I carry on with the parliamentary sketch? How about the European Parliament? When? Or the jellyfish? When? When shall I find the time?
Death, it seems to me, is not to be approached with terror, but with fury. There are a hundred lives begging to be lived, and no time. I feel no fear at all of pain or the unknown and would leap, tomorrow, into a vat of boiling oil if it ushered in eternity: but I am very sure that I should just be snuffed out, and will be. I see no philosophical problem about death: self-evidently we did not exist before we were born, so where is the mystery in not existing after we die? But I don't want to. It will be like the end of the summer holidays.
At best I have another 40 years, but it must be more than half over, now. Already I see small signs of the long deterioration ahead. I am not frightened, not mystified, not cowed by dread of sorrow at this certainty. I shall feel no awe, no anticipation and absolutely no fear in the face of death. Just completely fed up! I shall never go to the Moon! I shall not be able to follow the lives of my nine little nephews and nieces. I may never reach Kerguelen. There will never be time to find out everything about jellyfish.
