Cirrus@Austlit

'MY FATHER USED to say to me, ‘If you’re not into sport, you’re not really Welsh.’ It was not something he ever said to my sisters, with its connotations of manliness; just me. However, at thirteen, the only sport I was devoted to was surfing. But surfing was not a sport he could recognise. Not a team game, nor endemically Welsh – it looked to him effeminate, and the deeper I got into it the more he distanced himself from me.'  (Introduction)

'I CAN’T REMEMBER exactly how it started. With a random sighting, perhaps, of a lone surfer carving up a sunlit wave: like entering a cathedral for the first time and seeing all that stained glass. But from that point forward the sight, smell and sound of a storm swell steaming into shore exerted a devastating pull on me. I was a thirteen-year-old provincial boy from Swansea in South Wales, and already a student in the science of Atlantic swells, the way they travel to shore in neat parallel lines, in sets of three – a prime number. Swells have order but it comes from disorder; their source is always chaos. They arrive on shore in graceful step, wearing bridal veils of pale spindrift. What the eye can’t see is their fantastic propensity for violence.' (Introduction)