The ocean is a supreme metaphor for change. I expect the unexpected but am never fully prepared.

When you're surfing you're not thinking about where you parked the car or what you're going to do when you grow up or what you're going to buy when you've got lots of money. You know, you're just there. You're in the moment. And I think in a contemporary world, that's a rare privilege.

For every moment the sea is peace and relief, there is another when it shivers and stirs to become chaos. It's just as ready to claim as it is to offer.

The beachcomber goes looking for trouble, everything he finds is a sign of trouble. The writer is the same; without trouble he has nothing to work with, so he picks over the tide line, over the bits and pieces of people's lives with grim fascination.

And the sun on the wall of her room, the block of sun with all the tiny flying things in it. When she was little she thought they were the souls of dead insects, still buzzing in the light.

Surfing is sensual. It's a real-time engagement with the forces of nature, which happen to be echoes of the past (which after all, is all a wave really is). Briefly we defy gravity and ride the energy of storms from elsewhere. We are intensely alone as we do it and yet completely swallowed by something larger that enforces a sense of perspective and connectedness to the natural world. It's an experience we yearn to repeat so we go searching for it again and again and we spend years sitting in the water waiting for these radiating lines to come in across the event horizon.

Humour's the pay-off for all that existential horror.