ARDMORE POINT AND EAST OF THE SAW MILL.

ARDMORE POINT AND EAST OF THE SAW MILL.

They are jewels; little seaglass gems from the sea. We walk the beach, stooped, forgetting to look around us, plodding through mud and around driftwood and over seaweed. Avoiding the industrial detritus of bits of car and bits of ship and bits of machinery and old fish traps and ballast tips off the tip of the isthmus. The trains pass every half hour, marking out time for us.

“Find!”

Is Wendy’s trademark; with a wee leap into the air and a bottle stopper held in the air or lilac glass or sometimes red. Our ambition is to find a red glass bottle stopper.

Sometimes I sit. Among the pebbles, with the whipple of the flies around my head and the spiders flitting over the stones and occasionally myriad sand fleas flipping when I lift a rock to uncover their damp lair, and all the time the birds cry. So many birds; I do not know their names but gulls and oystercatchers and skylarks, blackbirds and crows and curlews and the wind, the wind making me mellow; soft, happy indeed.

I sit and drag my hands in an arc around me, picking out the smoothed green bottle necks, the wee jewels of amber, the pale lozenges of old coke bottles, the gleam of blue and the chunky bases of pitch black and in between; the pottery of crockery that would have once contained soup or held a Sunday roast and the round red smoothed shape of old bricks from ancient houses.

At home, we pile them into heaps, fill bottles with them, think of jewellery and pictures and glass-encrusted driftwood, clean the sand from bottle necks, put pale curves of wood into bleach filled baths and dream of all the things we will do.

I remember the wind and the sun and the slight tautness on our faces and Wendy’s lips as she turned round for a cuddle and a kiss. Confirmation that beach combing is the best; the very best of all.

(Photo, Ardmore point, 2021)