On Valentine’s Day I opened the front door to see a crisp half-moon hanging directly ahead of me and left the house. It was just after 6am, and I was late to catch a train to the seaside, where I would push my body gently into the water as a woman I’d never met watched on, camera in hand. 

It was, I admit, one of the stranger things I’ve done.

Polly got in touch a few weeks earlier, saying to let her know if I ever wanted to collaborate, perhaps that most millennial of verbs. She’s a photographer who makes pictures that are at once ethereal and rooted firmly in the every day. I liked the high-contrast of them, the kind of filmic effect that digital glosses out too often. A few days later, awake before the dawn with the baby kicking me in the ribs, I thought about the sea and I thought about my body, and I suggested I meet her at a place that both could collide. So here we were.

As London turned into Brighton the sky burned orange and then paled with mist to make a whitewashed dawn. When we had text in the days before, to firm up plans, we decided to meet early: “Special things happen at that time of the morning imo”, I’d written. Here they were - a train carriage all to myself, a sense of the preposterous, a sense that I should be doing it simply because it was preposterous. I had turned 35 weeks pregnant that same morning: soon there would be a baby, and I couldn’t just take myself off to the sea whenever I felt like it.

I’ve been brewing up words about swimming, and water, and pregnancy. The photos will be ready when they are ready. Until then, other good things from this week:...