I sometimes think I was born to be British. I enjoy the weather too much to live anywhere with less complex climate. I read about a woman from Africa who when speaking to relatives at home marvelled how much we talk about the weather and couldn’t comprehend it. Later, when she had been here a while she found she became the same because it’s so changeable and affects so much. I think it can be more complex still, normal words fall short in evoking the wealth and depth of influence.

Recently I was sat beside the Atlantic, I had a book with me and earbuds too.  Instead I found myself doing what I always seem to do when I’m near the ocean, staring out and watching the constant movement and listening to the perpetual crash of the waves on the beach.  The Atlantic has a way of making hours disappear in that way, like it turns down the volume of the rest of the world and stops it taking over my thoughts.

The waves arrive and retreat with endless variation, never quite repeating themselves. The colours change, from blackened and moonlit through to tropical seeming turquoise blues. The horizon shifts between silver, blue, green and iron-grey. Sometimes the sea seems content and washes gently at the sand and other times it hurls itself in a tempestuous fury against the land and I love it all. I read once that it’s called Blue Mind, a calm and meditative state which we enter when near water, coming back to oneself in relaxation. It’s so accurate.

There’s a word for people who love the sea; Thalassophile. I also love that there’s a word for this ardent admiration, finding a thrill, calm or peace being in or near the waves.  Occasionally you discover a word and it feels less like language and more like a deep sense of knowing precisely what that experience is.

Petrichor is another favourite. The scent that rises from the earth after rain. Most people have experienced it. That rich, grounding smell that drifts upwards from pavements, gardens and fields after a rain shower. The first time I encountered the word I delighted that there was a word. I was about thirteen, I walked a lot travelling to and from school and keenly noticed the seasons, the weather and the changing smell of the world as it passed through each change. I could sense the rain or snow coming, know the first touches of autumn before the leaves began to change colour.

It’s not as simple as appreciating sunshine, for all that I know about the phenomenal impact of sunshine on humans, though I am very fond of that too. Apricity, the warmth of the sun, especially in winter.  I love the deep  comfortable hush that settles over the world when snow lies thick upon the ground. The change in the quality of light as it reflects, glittering from the crystalline snowfall. The way sound becomes softened and distant, as though someone has wrapped the landscape and simplified the view. I adore the sound of rain against windows. The gentle patter that accompanies a good book and a steaming cup of tea. I love the harder, determined percussion of it drumming against roofs, roads and conservatories and the colossal and cleansing drama of it. We see those reels and memes showing someone reading a book sat on a window seat and it’s romanticised but it’s because it’s one of the most becalming aural experiences, allowing the reader to settle entirely into the world they are reading.

Which brings me to another wonderful word, pluviophile; a lover of rain. I revel in the sound of it arriving overnight. The comfort of hearing it while warm indoors but I’ll often sit in the kitchen with the patio doors wide open, watching the drops washing down the doors inside and out, inhaling the rain imbibed air. The way it transforms a familiar street into something reflective and shimmering. The way it gathers in puddles and reflects the world in new ways.

And then there is the wind; the summer breeze moving deliciously across sun-warmed skin. The first cool breath of autumn easing us toward the colder months. The coastal wind as it flies over the waves and arrives to riffle through my hair and clothes, cooling my skin and bringing the salt and ozone scent reminding me of where I am. Even now I can close my eyes and remember standing on Cornish cliffs, feeling the wind push against me while the sea crashed below. We experience all this and the scent of petrichor in forests and woodlands, another place I feel a deep seated sense of peace and wellbeing making me a nemophile amongst everything else. Or a dendrophile because I find trees quite enchanting. Perhaps Enid Blyton has something to answer for there.
Perhaps in this we can see eutierria, the deep state of belonging with the earth, in synchronicity of earths changes and cycles.

Another word I love is anamnesis, a deep remembering. Not remembering where you’ve left your glasses, which would admittedly be useful sometimes, but something older. A sense of recognition. The feeling that some part of you already knows something. I sometimes feel that beside the sea, as though I am returning to somewhere familiar, even when I have never stood in that exact spot before.  Perhaps that is why Cornwall affects me so strongly. But I feel the same when the wind scurries up a wave in the flatter North Sea in Whitby, or the choppy, blackened depths of Loch Ness.  Imagine the yearning of an astrophile, watching the beauty of the stars above and reflected in the water below. A selenophile who might admire the moon beside the complexities of our universe. Then a ceraunophile, someone drawn inextricably to the might and sound of thunderstorms. This is someone who enjoys the whole sensory experience and spectacle. This is me.

Life at home is interesting, busy and full. Water changes the speed of everything. I suspect that is why so many writers, artists and dreamers are drawn to the sea. There’s a word for that too. Nefelibata; cloud walker, someone who lives in imagination, dreams and thoughts. I was corralled at school, made to attend to school work which I would rush through to get it done, and return back to the wandering curiosity which lived inside me, always talking to others, playing, sharing ideas and which drew me to drama and theatre. One observation leads somewhere unexpected or a thought becomes a story.  A curiosity becomes three hours of research and twenty open browser tabs. Curiosity has never been a particularly efficient way to live but it has made life endlessly interesting.

Then there’s sonder. The sudden awareness that every person around you is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. I think about that one often when I travel. Because all of these people are vessels of memories of lives just as rich in moments as our own. Some of us live more interesting lives, some of us hurl ourselves at possibility and ride the wave, others skirt the tumult cautiously or perhaps deeply drowning in unawareness, yet each have minds full of experiences.

The words draw me in, seducing me with their novelty and precision and the knowledge I’m not the only person who has this relationship with the world around me. For otherwise the words would not exist. Someone else loved the sea enough to create thalassophile. Loved rain enough to create pluviophile. Noticed the scent of wet earth and gave us petrichor. Felt the strange wonder of other lives and gave us sonder. The sea. Rain on a window. Snowfall in silence. Autumn arriving on the wind. The smell of earth after rain. The feeling of recognising yourself in a word you have only just discovered.

A lover of words is a logophile, and we discover these often in books, and a person who loves books is a bibliophile.  A voyage of discovery folded into pages. Unfurling like a sail to carry us forward into the unknown, over the horizon of the world we already know. Perhaps returning us to where we belong; hiraeth, a Welsh word for the longing for home, even a home which might never have existed. To me that feels like the human need to belong. Or perhaps the journey is  because of fernweh, a German word meaning the longing for far-off places.
All these things make me a biophile, a lover of life and living, easily seduced by words and senses, romanced by the world around me, purely as it exists.