Seashore - Beside the Sea

                                                    Isle of Vatersay, Outer Hebrides

I was so fortunate, as a child, to have a wonderful sea view from my bedroom window. My father had his wish granted, to run a pub on Blackpool promenade and the family had landed in paradise. It was the beginning of summer and I remember it as blue skies and a sun that turned orange and slipped into a shimmering sea. We went on the beach, a lot. My sister and I played there, all day sometimes.  I went out for walks on the shoreline at dusk with my mum. It was our time on a calm evening, quiet, thoughtful, listening to the gentle waves. We strolled between South Pier and Waterloo Road, not far, just in front of where we lived. We would look for creatures in the tangle of seaweed that marked the tideline, but we only found bits of dead crab. It was our mother-daughter bonding. Moments that became special memories to treasure. Even now, many years later, I still think of that stretch of beach as mine.

Although born inland, I’ve always been drawn to the coast. Any coast will do. When our children were young we had family holidays in Pembrokeshire where every seashore is stunning. There are lots of sandy beaches to play on, also the fun of finding a way over the boulders to poke about in rock pools at Wiseman’s Bridge, or skimming stones at Amroth. We covered the English East Coast between Redcar and Withernsea, where the North Sea claims a bit more of the land each year. On a returning visit to Skipsea we were shocked to discover how much land had broken away, including a road that we had used.

The Scottish seashores are breath-taking. I could spend all day looking at Ailsa Craig from the Ayrshire coast. We stayed in a caravan at Embo on the Scottish North East coast where we stepped out directly on to the beach and walked along the shoreline every day. It is somewhere I hope to return to. The most stunning seashores I have found so far are in the Outer Hebrides. At South Uist, the sand shines silver and white, shells are bleached white with the sun – I brought some home and keep them in a jar.

I’ll be on my travels again soon. It’s time to breathe some Scottish air.

Here is Simon Armitage,

 

 

The Stone Beach

 

A walk, not more than a mile

along the barricade of land

between the ocean and the grey lagoon.

Six of us, hand in hand,

 

connected by blood. Underfoot

a billion stones and pebbles-

new potatoes, mint imperials,

the eggs of birds-

 

each rock more infinitely formed

than anything we own.

Spoilt for choice - which one to throw,

which to pocket and take home.

 

The present tense, although

some angle of the sun, some slant of light

back-dates us thirty years.

Home-movie. Super 8.

 

Seaweed in ropes and rags.

The weightless, empty armour

of a crab. A jawbone, bleached

and blasted, manages a smile.

 

Long-shore-drift,

the ocean sorts and sifts

giving with this, getting back

with the next.

 

A sailboat thinks itself

across the bay.

Susan, nursing a thought of her own

unthreads and threads

 

the middle button of her coat.

Disturbed,

a colony of nesting terns

makes one full circle of the world

 

then drops.

But the beach, full of itself,

each round of rock

no smaller than a bottle top,

 

no bigger than a nephew's fist.

One minute more, as Jonathan, three, autistic,

hypnotised by flight and fall,

picks one more shape

 

and under-arms the last wish of the day -

look, like a stone - into the next wave.

 

Simon Armitage

 

 

 

                                                       South Uist, Outer Hebrides

Thanks for reading, Pam x