By the time the starlings had finished it was almost dark and it felt like the whole of Brighton had gone home too. Indeed as I wandered homewards along the shore the world itself to my left seemed to have disappeared. I scrabbled across the pebbles toward the sea to have a look.

When nowadays we say things like “It’s the end of the world” we think of apocalypse and Armageddon, nuclear war, ecological disaster… it’s always an ending in time, but before the discovery (by Europeans at least) of the Americas, the ends of the world were an actual place where sea monsters dwelled and from which sailors rarely returned. Tonight, looking out into the soft, dense darkness, I wondered if such a place still existed.