My steps are silent in the soft sand, absorbed by the distant roar of the approaching surf. Light reflects on broad swathes of blinding ripples cascading across the beach down to the water’s edge. They create their own topography of estuary, delta, lakes or meandering trickles, contrasting tonally with wet and dry sand, the boulders in their rock pools, shingle, pebbles, and cast away flotsam and jetsam. Rusting hulks, an old car tyre jauntily cocked at an angle on part of an old chassis, dumped long ago, and a lump of cast iron from a fireback, or an engine sump, perhaps, are testament to the power of the equinoctial tide; they may not float, but they’ll dissolve, given time.

I am caught by a whiff of badger; sure enough, the tangle of’ thorn, bramble and long grass denote a sett nearby. Breather holes in the sand show a breeding chamber below. It is warm on the edge of the sea, the high tides don’t come this far; rain water drains away easily, and salt winds give well-covered Brock no trouble. It is an ideal place to set up home.

Indeed, there are many similar last-ditch standpoints, as the areas of thorn, bramble, and coarse seashore plants demonstrate. Badgers share their habitat with herring gulls, Great gulls, black-headed common gulls, larks, rooks and crows; hastily made scrapes and burrows indicate rabbit. It’s quite a Nature sanctuary here between the Ocean and the golf course, where the only menace is the occasional wandering dog, or a fox, perhaps, revealed by a pile of white feathers nearby.

The small stone and brick boxes, look-out posts against military invasion from the sea, are the last monuments to Man’s fear, vanity, violence and stupidity. Now filled with rubble and rubbish, used as toilets and hangouts for winos or tearaways, or desperate tourists, the animals will not go near them; only the gulls perch, facing the onshore breeze, allowing the wind to groom and preen their feathers into perfect alignment.

Walking takes no effort. The sky lightens - I am walking to rid myself of the contamination of town, urgently distancing myself from signs of human habitation. After an hour it is seven o’clock, and still no company but the birds. The smooth dry pebbles roll with my feet, my ankles constantly pivoting, accommodating the changes in angle and gradient. I reflect that pebble walking is good for PMT. I miss my dog. I feel no longer needed. I want to walk and walk this coastal path; all around England, Scotland, circling the U.K. mainland, and back to here - if I am in this Island prison, why not pace the boundaries, like the caged man-eaters in a Himalayan zoo?

A lark dips and flurries, dips and flurries, startled into the sky, her high wheedling tones like the whistles of a radio being tuned. Finally achieving a comfortably high invisible hover among the low cloud, she twitters in consternation then disappears soundlessly until she can safely re-approach her nest unobserved. I see no sign of a ground nest, yet resolutely keep to the track, careful not to create roof falls in subterranean dwellings. It's easy to see the animal trails where the ground is not undermined below, over common land.

Still the swiftly moving clouds show no sign of breaking up. A little patch of robin-egg blue, here and there, is quickly covered by foggy feelers of moist, heavy-laden air, driven hard by the high March winds, which leave the ground level almost undisturbed. The muted roar of the surf retreats to a whisper; the salt odour sharpens and intensifies.

In the stillness: badger and rabbit, seaweed, and an acrid overtone I cannot identify, until I see the burnt stones behind the thorn and bramble where someone has made a firepit. I reflect on the excellent qualities of thorn as a firelighter, the difficulty in gathering it, and the advantages of the ubiquitous dung, when trekking in my beloved Himalaya.

I am homesick for a home beyond these shores, found and now lost. I feel like Mole as he passed a spot that reminded him of the almost unbearable sensation of wanting to he back home: "It’s all right, Ratty, it wasn’t that important, just, I thought, I thought" (From 'The Wind in the Willows’). Yet fierce anger erupts from my gut to my throat. I long to be free, to be there, to be me, where I have no need to be held to ransom by the blackmailers; guilt, duty, obligation, logic, poverty, reliability, so the list goes on. It feels as though I have no power, just responsibility and accountability. No freedom, just a feeling of resentment and being trapped, and, like the Styx ferryman, I wonder who I can coerce into my corpse's shoes.

The path leads over a stream by a bridge. There is a stand of woodland nearby. Trees, all my beloved trees, hazel, ash, beech, willow, thorn, elder, yew, birch, are restoring sanity to my overheated brain. It seems my nervous system is my inner tree, my roots, fibres and branches tingling and raw, over-exposed to the frosty winds and storms of self-reproach and desire. I stand and stare as rooks and choughs, interrupted in their task of nest-building, create a cacophony of caws and squawks, tumbling high into the air, from tree to tree, as I turn to watch them with a direct gaze.

The path between the trees looks inviting, but leads along a culvert where I shall be cut off from returning to the beach. I recross the stream at the bridge where it flows into a concrete canal, strained of leaves and branches by prison bars of steel, before gushing down to the outfall at the foot of the beach.

‘The Ocean, the Ocean, refuses no river’ sings Sheila Chandra, Indian chanteuse of the divine voice; (Chandra is Moon in Hindi). Death takes all corners eventually, so why fret if this is not good enough - soon it will be gone, each moment, so give thanks, oh, please, appreciate, or die in your waking dream, becoming glassy-eyed like commuter clones in cardboard, marching endlessly along railway platforms, creatures of habit and conformity.

Help yourself; no-one can stop you from drowning if you want to; there is only this life to live, so BEAUTIFUL if only we look and give thanks, forgetting yearning, waiting, all comes in good time, the PLAN is perfect, only pray to be allowed to see it. Thank you. Blessed bliss, just a curtain and a breath away.

I lie, full length, belly down, nose against a tree trunk, squinting through the undergrowth to take a picture of the stream, the tree tops, the misty Quantock hills beyond. Still there is no sun, just a grey, soft, dove-grey morning. Wood doves awaken. The wood welcomes me; it is present and aware. I am a visitor and watched, I feel like the guest speaker at a school assembly; I have nothing to say. Gradually the attention lapses, I submerge into it and become like a wood-being too. Conscious of being still supine and a little damp, I arise, brush off my front and walk on.

I come to an old bridge, around 12th century, where there are swans and ducks on the wetlands beyond, among the reeds and rushes, on one side of the stream. On the other - what’s that? A flock of migratory Canada geese are grazing the rolling grassland through a gate by the bridge. They shoot up their heads on their long necks as I approach, and they stand, alert, watching me watching them.

I want to see them fly. Futilely I lean over the gate and shout, flapping my arms. They walk off in a hurried waddle, keeping their dignity; a crowd, a gaggle, but silent, walking in synchronized poetry like a shoal of fish, a swarm of bees, a trainload of commuters, not regarding each other. Their heads are all turned to keep me in their one-eyed stare, whilst retreating at the same speed as that with which I follow them. I laugh, give up and photograph them as they are.

As I return through the gate to the golf course they watch me solemnly. I feel like apologising for the newly acquired camera; but this is the record of my holiday, a million miles from anything my children would want to do. They are already so socially conditioned - I feel as though I have borne them for the State, to consume and to be consumed.

There is such a thin line between consciousness and reason. Alienated from one world, yet part of another of mankind’s making. This is the legacy of my generations’ inadequacy to the task we were attempting; to expose and tackle corruption, until ridicule, obstruction and apathy left it to mount up, touched but not treated, only by a few under the auspices of ECO organisations and so-called 'environmentally-friendly' (!) big business. (Another 'God' for sale!)

No one has charged us for this life or for this planet. The concept of profit, of capital growth, of interest in monetary terms, is all an invention of human beings. It is humans, supposedly the most intelligent species, who are holding the world and everything in it to ransom. The secret world economy, the Western Governments' investment in big business, is based on war toys, chemicals, and the exchange rate mechanism (or stock exchange). This corresponds to an economy based on guns, drugs and money just like the smugglers and criminals that they appear to oppose.

The 'secret chiefs' are those powers behind the scenes that seduce Third World countries into ever more impossible debt, and jockey with each other as to how many 'marbles' they have. Yet they manage to keep the depth of their depravity secret under so-called ‘national security' laws. Do they think we can’t see? Don't care? Their transparent greed and shortsighted wickedness is fuelling and feeding itself. These world leaders are the puppets of their own schemes, in attempting to be masters, and they are products of a system that started long before they were born.

Across the golf course it begins to rain. I am inarticulate and impotent in my anger, so many angers. I watch the rainfall, large drops sending concentric rings onto the surface of the water lying in carefully contrived hollows by the putting greens. The rings intersect, both including and intersecting one another. I stand and watch them from a small footbridge.

There is no either-or; only points of view, radiating out like the drops on the surfaces of our minds. These thoughts, in bud, bloom only on reflection, yet must be weeded out if tranquility is to be maintained. Towards the pursuit of serendipitous pleasures!

I walk purposefully to the beach where I consult my watch; it is half past seven, and I have already been walking since before dawn. There are about three miles to go, so I should be back by eight thirty to awaken the children, because today we have to leave.

A little way along the coast path I see the fishermen I met the day before; They took my photograph yesterday when I interrupted them digging for lugworms for today’s bait, while the tide was still low in the late afternoon. They seemed surprised to see me today, two miles further down the coast, returning from a walk so early in the morning.

The fishermen have only just arrived and set up their rods, the tide now high enough to warrant it. We take each other's photos again; I chat with them a while and then sit and gaze at the sea, leaning against some driftwood. The rain soon becomes heavier; it's time to go.

Continuing along the path I meet joggers, dogwalkers, and golfers; with so many people, what hope is there for wildlife? Insects will be the last. I keep getting the feeling that this is the winding-up time for an experiment that has gone wrong and is about to be ‘seasonally adjusted’ give or take a millennium or two.

My mind conjures up scenarios, so I call it sharply to heel, and admire the flowering vetches and circular spots of close-cropped, rabbit-grazed grass, from last year’s seeds. I see my own footprints approaching me, turn and measure my boots against them in the sand. Yes, they are mine. It’s a strange feeling, like meeting one’s ghost from a past life.

The terrain changes from sand to boulders, then to grass, then to rubble where the sea defense has been scooped up and scraped flat by some huge, deafening, roaring manmade machine. I feel the rabbit's fear; ears flattened, feet thumping, trembling, with white eyes staring in terror and shock. Then, briefly, it is gone, and bear Brock looks on wisely in my mind's eye.

'They come; they go - we're always here, you know...'

His front paws step sideways, describing a circle around his rear. With his back turned, he undulates, his peculiar bounding gait retreating rapidly, reminding me of a sea lion. My vision returns to normal and I find I am still staring at the scarred, ripped earth between the path and the sea. I walk on.

The rain is more persistent now; the pebbles’ colours shine in the wet. The sea stalks more closely, grey-brown and sandy, disturbed and noisy. It growls up the beach and sucks hoarsely back, like the morning wheeze of an old smoker. I stand and stare; realising there is purity here, against all that we throw at it. Like Mother Ganga, life is stronger than illusion and death; I walk on.

Finally I come to the end of the coastal path. There is time to sit and watch the surf, pounding the sea wall now, sending up high flumes of spray every seventh wave or so. I cannot bear to tear myself away, but it’s eight thirty, and we’re leaving today.

'Minehead.' Yes, my poor head, caught in the revolving doors of midlife, looking at the load I programmed myself with. It's too late now to do anything but run the program, be positive, and help those teenagers of mine, and others in this bleak society, to find some hope for the future besides the slog of doing all we left undone, and undoing all we should not have done. The sins of the fathers... Already it is too late to tell them how to go on, when they can see the mess we have made.

As parents, what does it mean, this nominal responsibility ‘to care for and direct’ when all they want is their own freedom. We are the ropes of their restraint, our psyche the womb that defines the present limit of their territories. We must let go. They must struggle free. The future we have created for them may not be the path they want to take, so they have to find their own way. Such gifts, such an incredible game-board, such carefully crafted pieces, but the cheats have stacked the odds. Time to change the rules, it’s their turn now. As the worm turns, so does the tide.