Every sea should have its mermaid.
All the most romantic waters of the world have them. So why not the English Channel?
Granted, a mermaid in these murky waters would have to be a specialist. The Channel's shipping lanes are infamous.
From our picture window on the Folkestone coast, we watched great grey monster tankers pass by, of proportions undreamt of by your average 19th century mermaid.
Equipped with my iPhone ship finder, I noted a great tanker bound for Brest, a cargo ship off to Southampton and another carrying freight to Plymouth. Hot on their heels is the Trefin Adam, a tanker on its way to Le Havre.
If a mermaid can make it here, she can make it anywhere.
Her CV must surely include holding her own with world-class shipping, scuba-diving in murky waters with almost zero per cent visibility, and a downright British imperviousness to the cold. The food here isn't great: fish here do not taste of sunshine.
Who in their right minds would apply for the job?
Not that we don't need a mermaid. These creatures are the ultimate in Machiavellian power, and the Kent coast could use shedloads of that, right this minute.
Mermaids and humans go back a long way. It is the ghostly story of the sister of Alexander the Great which always sticks in my memory.
Her name was Thessalonike.
She fuelled a Greek fairy tale which seems to ignore her real and untimely death at the hands of a son.
Alexander The Great, it is fabled, searched high and low on his travels for The Fountain of Immortality. He found it; and filled a bottle with its waters, bringing it back to wash his sister's hair.
Alas, he did not bring back any for himself. When he died she was beside herself with grief and threw herself into the clear blue Aegean waters to die.
Of course, she could not. Instead, she became a living ghost, with supernatural power to wreck a boat should she wish it. She would approach boats, crazed by the passing of aeons, and ask them: Is Alexander the king alive?
A woman, bereft of wits but with such overarching powers, should be appeased, whatever the cost: and sailors were compelled to lie through their teeth, looking straight into that wild-eyed immortal face, and answer that of course Alexander was alive and ruling healthily and with extraordinary longevity.
If they lied, she let them pass. If they told the truth, her fury knew no limits, and a ship and all its crew were doomed.
The weight of three thousand years of myth has been brought to bear on a very modern mermaid indeed.
She sits on a rock next to Folkestone's sandy beach, staring out past the utilitarian concrete-cast harbour to a grey Channel. If she squinted she would just be able to see the white cliffs of France.
She is the cast-bronze work of an extraordinary artist, Cornelia Parker, who is well-known for art which seems utterly different to this statue. Shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1997, her work is all about what lies beneath: testing everyday objects, causing us to question them.
She commissioned the army to blow up a garden shed in Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991)and then reconstructed the fragments to portray the moment, mid-blast.
She hired actress Tilda Swinton to lie in a case in The Maybe (1995) surrounded by other glass cases, filled with statues of historical figures.
And she says the Folkestone Mermaid, commissioned as part of this year's Folkestone Triennial, is a natural progression.
This mermaid is substantial. While she is inspired by Edvard Eriksen's Little Mermaid- modelled on a prima ballerina-Folkestone's mermaid is based on a 38-year-old mother-of-two, Georgina Baker, from Sandgate.
Cornelia leafletted the houses on this part of the coast, to find a model with the spirit she wanted.
"It didn't matter what shape, size or age you were",
she tells The Tate Channel in a recent interview,
"I was looking for somebody who had a spirit."
The mermaid sits on a rock, looking out to sea, with all the experience and serenity womankind brings to her position. She's not a fairy tale figure built on a town's fantasy, or a crazed Ophelia-stereotype like Thessalonike, but a study in modern-day assurance. This mermaid has common sense.
And perhaps that's just as well.The mermaid in charge of the Channel can handle the tankers, be in no doubt. She can navigate virtually zero visibility, and take any temperature you care to throw at her. Resilience is her middle name.
Every sea should have a mermaid. Our English Channel, such an oversubscribed strip of grey water, must have one who contradicts perceptions: one like Folkestone's.
A mermaid of consequence.