A small coastal town; a place where nobody goes in winter, a place where nothing happens when the sun doesn’t shine. A place that ships always leave behind, on the way to somewhere else beyond the far horizon.

A dilapidated café at the end of an empty road, seemingly held up by the cables and wires attached to the electricity and telephone poles. The broken streetlamp completes the picture of despair. 

High above the silence below some gulls came and circled for a few minutes before they too took their leave. They had no reason to stay. Not even a stray dog or creeping cat appeared on the scene. This was a place where life itself seemed to have left and closed the door. Even the rain was silent.

The rain didn't really fall, it just gave up and fainted like a dying cloud onto the broken road. Everything was still and grey, even the sea just beyond the deserted cafe was was silent; it just lay there, unmoved by any breeze or wave. No ship passed by leaving no wake from rusty bows to cut a line through the steel grey water. The sea was an empty grey page, unmarked and blank. 

Once, this town was a busy port, loading and unloading all manner of cargo; landing freshly caught fish from the rough and tough trawlers that returned from the wild north sea and away as far as the glacial waters of Iceland with bulging bellies full of cod and haddock. But the market closed down and the fishermen have gone, taking their trawlers to other ports. The fish are now brought here by lorries.

On New Year's day nobody came to visit, except me. 
Standing in the empty road, wrapped in a shroud of misty rain, I took a picture. It was the last picture on the last roll of film I had used that day. The shutter clicked and captured the light of that small moment, some of the silver bromide crystals began to react as the photons struck them, creating a latent image of a moment that would never return. I turned around and left, and just like one of those passing ships, I never returned.