Malvarrosa in January

Some people go to the beach in August. I go in January, wearing my grandmother's wool coat and carrying a coffee flask that has leaked around the lid since the day I bought it. On Sunday I left the flat at quarter past nine, in a pair of fingerless gloves Marta gave me for Epiphany "so you can keep playing". I don't play the violin on the bike, Marta. But I wore them anyway, because they're pretty and because at quarter past nine on a January Sunday there's a damp cold that gets right into your knuckles.

I rode down the old Turia riverbed, Sunday joggers overtaking me as if I owed them money, then straight towards the sea on the bike lane, past the houses of the Cabanyal with their green and yellow tiles. There's a moment, just before you reach the promenade, when the air changes. It smells of salt and rotting seaweed, which sounds awful written down, but to me it's the best smell in Valencia. That smell is my grandfather.

A borrowed beach

In summer Malvarrosa belongs to everyone: towels, umbrellas, speakers playing reggaeton, kids crying because their ice cream fell in the sand. In January it's like walking into a house while the owners are away. Everything is there, but quiet. The promenade terraces have their chairs stacked and chained together. The showers are off. The sand is packed and cold, almost hard, and sticks to your soles in slabs.

There weren't many people. A man with a metal detector sweeping the shoreline with the patience of a monk. A woman of about seventy in a pink tracksuit walking very fast, swinging her arms as if she were conducting an invisible orchestra. Two dogs chasing each other with no owner in sight. And me, sitting on my grandmother's coat, wrestling with the flask.

The sea was greyish green, with dirty foam at the edge and heaps of dried posidonia piled up in dark stripes. The light was white, the kind that doesn't cast shadows. I drank the coffee, which was already lukewarm, and sat for a while watching the waves break. In winter they're shorter and more nervous.

January without weddings

I'll be honest, since that's what this is for: January is the month I wonder whether I can actually live off music. From November to March almost nobody gets married, so the quartet has no gigs and I only have my salary from the school, which covers the rent, the electricity and not much else. This month there's also the violin insurance, which always renews at the worst possible moment.

It's not that it eats at me every day. It's that January is quieter, and quiet lets you hear these things. On the beach I tried doing the sums in my head and got three different results, so I gave up.

My grandfather was from the Cabanyal and always said "la mar", the sea as a woman, the way fishermen do. When I was little he brought me here in winter with an omelette sandwich wrapped in foil and told me the sea in January was for people who weren't in a hurry. I was eight and in an enormous hurry, but I liked him saying it.

Before leaving I did what I always do, and I know it's silly: I took off my shoes and socks and put my feet in the water. I screamed. Not an elegant scream, a real one, the kind that comes from your stomach. The woman in the pink tracksuit turned, looked at me very seriously and then burst out laughing. So did I. My feet were red as prawns and I couldn't feel them.

I cycled home with sand in my socks and the flask dripping into my backpack. Marta was on the sofa, still in her pyjamas, under a blanket with her laptop.

"How was the beach?" she asked.

"Cold," I said. And went to have a shower.