On Migration; or, Everything Makes Me Think Of You by Our Wild Pages Residency Writer Nashwa Nasreldin

Image of Felixstowe coast taken by Nashwa during the residency.
 
By Nashwa Nasreldin | 9 July 2026

Our Wild Pages Writers Residency in November 2025 invited six talented local writers to Felixstowe library for a week to explore the connection between nature and the written word.
 
Here, writer Nashwa Nasreldin reflects on the week through pages of her own diary.

Ziua întâi

Notes from talk by Joe Underwood, warden at Suffolk Wildlife Trust

Black Tailed Godwits, Knots
Shelducks and Dark-bellied Brent Goose
Stour and Orwell estuaries
Mitigating loss of land due to expansion
Targeting Lapwings and Redshanks – characteristic of Suffolk
In 30 years or so, all have come after building the reservoir
Only site on river Orwell that has Lapwings and Avocets
Brown hares, (also) characteristic of Suffolk
Various creatures, invertebrates, live in dead tree rot
Grey seal, Porpoises
European protected species
Lapwings = good parents
Fleabane – good nectar source for insects
Bee orchids, small copper butterflies
Snow bunting
Avocets: not so good parents
Garganay winter in Africa and come to us during the summer.
Spoonbills, Short-eared Owl (from Scandinavia)
Kestrel, Barn Owl
Rareties: Black Tern and Purple Heron. Becoming more common as Mediterranean climate is very dry now
Badgers, the only animals that eat hedgehogs
Climate change since 2005 has changed a lot
Chiffchaffs and Blackcaps used to migrate south to Africa, now they stay here as it’s warm enough
Flowers too…

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Day Two

Driving back from the Trimley Marshes Nature Reserve, we see a man atop a ladder propped up against the front of a house. He is hanging a St George’s flag.

 

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Day Three

Note from my concurrent online evening writing course:
Hiraeth: A deep longing for something you can never return to, and which may never have existed.

 

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Day Four

I’m sitting on a wall facing the sea. The sun is rising directly in front of me, blinding me. It is relatively high above the horizon, a large vessel passing slowly beneath it, a shadow from here. The waves are only slightly menacing, tall but just about possible to swim through—not over.

The groyne to my left, the one jutting out deepest into the sea, is being continually smothered by the surf. Each wave submerges around five feet of the concrete wall, then falls off the surface like a slipping sheet. The structure barely has a chance to recover when the waves retreat, before another one breaks and it is smothered again. The erosion the front end has suffered is clear from the contrast with the rear, though the sturdier section is covered in a thin layer of green moss.

And the waves keep coming back for more. Relentless. The groyne is submissive to its fate. It cannot protest. Every now and then, a thick trickle of water drains from a crack in the top that has formed a groove from edge to edge. Will that groove, and others that may form, eventually sink deeper until the front breaks off and is eventually washed right down to stone?

It will no doubt be replaced, since the groynes are here to serve a function. But will anyone or anything care about what was lost? The groynes to the immediate right of the pier take the hardest hit, with waves smashing against them.

To my right, a pile of large rocks that jut out at the same angle as the groynes, are also wet and gleaming. Waves race along the breadth of the North sea towards it, as though in a bet over who can beat the rocks the hardest with their froth. Or a game of Nervous where each one dares to travel furthest before it loses its nerve and breaks just a few feet shy of the rocks.

The sound of the sea spray is silenced by the continuous roar of the waves. A seagull perches on the dry surface of another groyne. It faces away from the sea, looking towards the people passing along the promenade, past the scattered beach huts and shuttered snack stalls. It is difficult to imagine the bustle of this exact spot in summer.

No one is braving a sea swim this sunny November morning. The waves are higher now the wind is picking up. This last one was twice my height, the wash reaching deeper into the beach, over the damp, packed beige sand threaded with multicoloured pebbles.

 

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Day Five

It’s the end of the writing residency week and I’ve been struggling to write about Felixstowe, but this morning I wonder if it feels too much like home. In Thorpeness or Aldeburgh, I feel like I’ve travelled. I know I can’t stay for long; both unaffordable and so pretty.

Felixstowe feels more welcoming, the seaside traditional British, a walkable pier, albeit with fewer amusements than Southwold, plenty of fish and chip shops, Mr Whippies along the beachfront, stalls selling seaside gifts and cold weather essentials – hats and gloves. This close to winter and they still sell buckets and spades, along with bouncy balls on long elastic string and windmill toys, because there will be children walking by who pay no attention to weather.

I think back to the huge skies in Aldeburgh, the sprawling pebbly beach and irresistible marshes, drawing the entire landscape into their fold. The very real threat of cliff erosion in sweet Thorpeness and the harsh reality of loss in Dunwich.

The more time I spend along the Suffolk coast, the more I cherish it. Surely this welcoming land would not toss me out, not when I care for it. I walk its length and pay attention to its lines and curves, carve its contours into my memory and into words that I’m scattering here like stones.

This is the opposite of hiraeth, a longing for this place [home] that newly exists for me. I never knew it before and I’m not necessarily interested in learning its history. I’m only interested in the way I know it now. Because things and places evolve.

When I first moved to my Suffolk town, people stared at me like I was a moving spectacle. Over the years, the town has evolved. I try not to hold on to that past vision; I let it go. It doesn’t serve me. I’m coming to terms with the fact that I am a nomad, moving from home to home depending on the circumstances. A migrating bird, a bedouin, I adapt, settle when it’s time and know when to move on.

My roots don’t run deep but that’s okay. Like the sun, I rise over a multitude of landscapes and exist in different forms. I can mean different things to whoever sees me from their vantage point. I’m here, consistent and ever-watching, for those who seek me.

And if I’m not needed, I will rise for my own self, for the glory of feeling as magnificent as a living being, capable of rising and sinking and rising again, until, one day, we don’t.