As the great poet Spike Milligan wrote, 'I must go down to the sea again/the lonely sea and the sky/I left my shoes and socks there/I wonder if they're dry'.

This is a parody of the one-time Poet Laureate John Masefield, who is almost named after Mansfield, a small town in Notts, who incidentally, have just been thrown out of the Football League.

The nearest I came to a Poet Laureate was a few months ago when passing through the new Eurotunnel Link in St Pancras, London. I posed for a photograph by the statue of John Betjeman. The statue is small, whereas nearby, the terminal's second new statue of a couple kissing, is a monstrous size. Perhaps this says something to us about the relative values this country puts on poetry and sex.

Back to the briny; authors have not written much about taking a dip in the sea (though let me recommend the book Waterlogged by Roger Deakin where the author swims his way round the lakes, rivers and inlets of the UK).

Some writers are wary of the element. Joseph Conrad wrote 'I have known the sea too long, to believe in its respect for decency' a sentiment I had sympathy with 20 years ago after spending six months sailing and working with fishermen in the wilds of the North Sea.

Yet the sea still draws us like nothing else, and come this time of year the compulsion occasionally returns to immerse myself in it.

I am partly driven by the legendary one-legged swimmer of Cullercoats who I see regularly returning from his morning dip. Rude health shines from him as it shines from everyone who indulges sea bathing, daily or not.
I know several women, some members of Whitley Bay's Panama Club, who are regular dippers, and they too seem to be invested with good health denied to many of our sickly pill-popping population.

My own view (wildly unscientific, and based on no credible research) is that the sea is more beneficial than 99 per cent of the pills we swallow – pills whose sales may bring a rosy glow to the bank accounts of drug company shareholders, but who else?

The sea is a splendid health benefit right on our doorstep, which we are strangely reluctant to make use of. Witness the thousands of coastal trippers during last week's hot and turbulent weekend.

Many changed into their bathers, sat on their towels, and stared hours long at the sea's horizon. A few ventured their tootsies into the briny, squealed, and left.

I was, dear readers, the only person on the North End of the Long Sands last Saturday afternoon, to go right under.

The initial impact is horrendous, the entire body subjected to a sudden, shocking cryogenic onslaught. This leaves the limbs shuddering and stiffened, the teeth uncontrollably chattering. Lips turn a shade of purple favoured by Goths, and the skin is a bubble-wrap of goose-pimples.

When you eventually emerge to run up the beach, the stares are a mixture of pity and incredulity – who is this mad gadgie?

Yet later, showered, dressed, you are a fully charged battery, radiating energy and optimism. You are transformed by the sea both physically – the immersion is good for the heart, for aching limbs, and for arthritis – and mentally.

To be immersed in the sea, however briefly, however occasionally, is to be linked to an energy force more mysterious, more durable and more compulsive than most of the nonsense with which we surround ourselves. We become something else.

Disgruntled charvers should go in the sea, stressed businessmen, bored housewives, lonely single parents, those in dead-end jobs, and failed relationships, those who have given up on life. They should all pick up a bather, get themselves to the beach, and no matter how daunting and cold it seems, take the plunge. Even for a few minutes, they should let the sea take them.

It costs nothing. No-one gets a cut. No need to make an appointment. It's open every day. Go on then. Get in.

PETER MORTIMER

Mortimer at Large, Selected Columns, published by IRON Press/North Tyneside Libraries.