SUNDAY LETTER - MAY 05

I came home with a baby and a theory.

The theory was that the version of life I'd grown up with, the smaller one, the one with sand in the car and salt on the windows, had been right all along, and the years I'd spent trying to upgrade it had mostly been a long, expensive detour. New York taught me that. So did Los Angeles. So did a few weeks in Tokyo where I ate the best meal of my life alone, in a ten-seat counter restaurant, and walked back to the hotel thinking about home.

The baby just needed to be near the water.

We landed in Newcastle in February. The light was doing the thing it does in late summer, where everything looks slightly overexposed and the harbour goes the colour of a beer bottle held up to the sun. I drove past the Bogey Hole on the way home from the airport and thought: right, that's still there. Some things don't move. That's the deal.

This publication is about that deal. Not the moving home part, that's its own kind of cliché now. The other part. The one where you stop trying to make life happen somewhere else and start paying attention to where you actually are.

It's called Marram, after the grass that grows on the dunes here. You've walked past it a thousand times without naming it. Pale, wiry, unspectacular. Its roots go three metres down, and without it, the coast blows away.

Coasts don't hold themselves together. People do. Not the ones passing through, photographing the headland and moving on. The ones who chose a place and stayed long enough to know which dawns are worth getting up for, which baths to swim at on which morning, which cafes to walk into without ordering. The ones for whom the small repetitions of a coastal life aren't a compromise but the whole point. They're the ones this publication is about.

Made in Newcastle. Sent on Sundays. For anyone who chose this kind of life, or is quietly thinking about it.

I'm glad you're here.

Luke