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

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Shells - Cockles and Mussels, Alive, Alive Oh

There’s something I’ve always found relaxing about a stroll on a beach and the sound of the sea. Most of the places I visit are coastal or within reasonable striking distance.  It is a strange thing that I live on the Fylde Coast with our wonderful expanse of beaches yet never set foot on them. I can’t remember last time I was on the sands at Blackpool but probably not since my children, now adults, were small.

The beach was my playground when I was a girl. We lived on the front, just the promenade and the tram tracks to cross and I was there, usually with others. After I’d grown out of making sand-pies and digging for water, my interests turned to marine life and I would go looking for creatures. A good place to search was in the rock pools around the outside of the old open-air swimming baths. My mother was not impressed with a collection of starfish I took home in a bucket to our pub and my father was tasked with taking them back ‘before any more climb out on to the stairs’. Starfish getting stuck on the stairs isn’t what you expect to see when you call in the vault for a pint, not even in Blackpool. I was given a lecture on sea-life needing a proper, natural habitat and those poor starfish would have been suffering. I’d done a similar thing with tadpoles in a jam jar a couple of years earlier, before we moved to Blackpool, and I clearly hadn’t learnt, but that’s another story.

These days I look for interesting shells and I’m not harming anything by keeping them. A few times a year my travels take me to the South and South West coasts of Scotland, where I will search for shells and watch our dog having the time of his life in the sea. Storage jars are great for keeping my shells safe and for display purposes. The large mussel shells are a beautiful dark blue in the sunlight and the mother-of-pearl shines on the inside. A couple of trips to the Outer Hebrides gave me the opportunity to find some whiter than white cockle shells. I keep them separate, with a couple of scoops of silver sand I brought home from the Hebridean Atlantic coast.

I’d like to visit the Orkney Islands and bring shells home from there, but maybe I should pay more attention to the coastline right here on my own doorstep, at least for the time being.

 

My own poem,

 

Seashell Keepsake

 

In the corner of a mem’ry box

I found the tiny shell.

It must have meant something to me once,

But now, I cannot tell.

Who wrapped it in some silver paper

Torn from a serviette?

It might be from one of the children

So why would I forget?

I can still recall all thirty names,

That class from ’99.

Those lively, summer-born four year olds

Learning to stand in line.

Just a small, pretty, pale pink spiral

Someone once gave to me,

Now back in the box where I found it

And wrapped up carefully.

 

PMW 2018

 

 

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x

 

 

 

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