Tutorial exercise

My offering for Tutorial 1: Write and outdoor scene using the present tense. Piece should include (I'm paraphrasing like mad now) as many of the senses as possible, look at the bigger picture then focus on the minutiae, something like that, and it must be in the present tense. Seems the course people love the present tense. There is a reason for this. I just need to work it out! Anyway, as it was written (which is actually, in the best traditions of how real writers write, an accentuated, edited, bulked, polished version of a previous entry on the blog. How's that for magic? ......

.....My turn I guess. This really did happen, I had my notebook with me, but I was afraid that if I took it from my pocket it would fly off, and I would never see it again. So I made mental notes ;)

I've stopped the car on my way home, as I always said I would, to walk in an area that sits tantalisingly close to the road I travel daily. The sea is the colour of lead and is leaving. The sky, grey but bright. The sand yellow where it's dry, then brown then pockmarked then shiny. On the horizon where the deep sea grey meets the washed out grey of the sky, there are two boats. They look like children’s bath toys, or drawn features on a canvass, put there by an artist to break the monotony of the two vast empty spaces. They're sitting still and indifferent to this little local ritual. Untroubled and unaffected by the seas seeming indecisiveness.

As I’m walking, I notice that the wind, now quite fierce, is ripping through the soft powder sand; gusts are zipping along the dry parts making a daunting yellow smoke that's rippling along the surface. Some of these fine grains are stinging my face, getting trapped in my hair, and my eyelashes are feeling crusts newly made from tears and salt and dust.

Further down where the sea is on the retreat, it's leaving new damp sand behind, impervious to the wind, it's flat and smooth but with a hint of grain, like the surface of polished wood. Like pine or light oak. I look at it closer and it reminds me of something else; the 'grain' in the sand caused by the swirl of the retreating sea has made it look almost like tanned leather.

Further along the line where damp sand meets dry, small stones appear to shimmer, wetly, like jewels washed up and abandoned by the receding sea, breaking the silky smoothness of the sand grain. And I see a new texture here that reminds me of flattened cake mixture, patted and rolled - each stone now either a currant, a sultana, or a raisin.

At the sea's edge, the tiny, thinly rolled waves of dirty white froth, helped by the wind, are making that unbroken waterfall sound, not punctuated by ebb and flow and rattling, but a continuous susurrus sound as it’s being drawn back, almost reluctantly it seems, back into the sea’s belly.

Further along the shore, I notice little semi circular holes appearing in the sand, six rows per section, looking like a succession of half buried cheese graters, all lined up, like soldiers ready for inspection. And everything is orderly once again. But as I look behind me from the direction I came from, where the sand dunes live, and are never troubled by the sea, the smoke sand is reaching its destination, swirling up into transparent yellowish clouds as if the dunes are being reinforced by the ghosts of a thousand mermaids.