When I was a boy, a seagull once swooped out of the sky and stole a grilled cheese sandwich out of my hands and flew away. An hour later we saw a seagull with black spiky hairs growing out from under its feathers. I was certain the mutation was an instant result of its stealing my human food. Seagulls only terrorised me one week out of the year, on my summer visits to my cousins in Hull, a small town on the Nantasket Peninsula in Massachusetts. I was also bitten by a dog, very porous as a goalie at street hockey, basically a whiffer at backyard wiffleball – but a real whiz at remembering baseball statistics, and the accumulator of jars and jars of seaglass. Otherwise, growing up in Hopkinton, 26 miles west of Boston – site of the start of the Boston Marathon, the first tricklings of the Charles River and a reservoir with a rope swing not quite ready for TV – I was and am a land lover. My parents, who grew up in Hull and the neighbouring town of Scituate, left Hopkinton ten years ago to return to the sea, and settled in Fairhaven, on Buzzards Bay, in the armpit-like area between Cape Cod and Rhode Island. Last week I went back for a full dose of family gatherings, my first since the Bush administration. ‘Hey shitbag, try some of my moonshine,’ my uncle greeted me when I pulled up to my aunt’s house. In the back of his pickup truck he had two jars, one clear, one dark. That was the spirit.
