There’s a pile of pebbles by our front door. I’d stopped seeing them, the way that you do, and then when we had that one day of sunshine last weekend I was seeing everything anew and the stones were shiny and the bottle-glass both matt and translucent and I was glad they were there.
I grew up almost as far from the sea as you can get in England, which is not of course very far at all. For the first half of my life being at the seaside was a treat for high days and holidays, or sometimes, in my teens, an outrage perpetrated by parents who liked boats. The beaches I love are North Atlantic, and for most of the last 25 years I’ve lived within walking distance: Reykjavik, west Cornwall, Dublin. Give me a steely grey light, dark water, rock and turf, or if there is pale sand and blue water I’d rather be in Connemara or Shetland or the Hebrides than anywhere tropical, wearing wellies and a woolly hat against the Arctic wind, rejoicing in one blessed day of sun. I wilt in hot weather and have no desire to appear anywhere outside my own bathroom less than fully clothed, but it’s not just physical; a northern aesthetic feels like truth to me in a way that no more conventional paradise ever could.
You get pebbles, I’m sure, on hot beaches too. I dare say people stoop under a blazing sun, dripping sweat and sunscreen, to collect baked beauties, because there’s something about the hand-sized, sea-polished stones that invites both touch and acquisition, something in their curves and weight that some of us can’t resist. I’ll take off my gloves, even, to know them skin on stone, to dust off sand before I put them in my pockets. Though geology is easily traced and they have rarely come far, there’s an air of mystery about a pebble, an egg-like self-containment, although part of the appeal is surely their absolute simplicity. They are replete. No innards, no corners, nothing to be revealed. I like mine best gently asymmetrical, ideally with a stripe or ring or veins.
Though there are signs now on some British beaches imploring visitors not to take away the stones (if everyone did that, where would we be?), usually pebbles seem both abundant and free, a combination that is now and has probably always been rare. As with any kind of foraging, as if we were gathering blackberries for jam, there’s a greedy impulse, restrained partly by weight and partly by some deep sense of what is a fair share, what is sustainable.
I’d rather be in Connemara than anywhere tropical, wearing wellies and a woolly hat
English was never pure or logical. Policing how other people speak is pointless and unattractive
The prize for everyday sexism on the high street goes to hairdressing salons
Every piece of clothing I buy is matched by a parting: one in, one out. It focuses the mind
When the kids were little and we lived in Cornwall, we’d have one sorting of pebbles when leaving the beach, another before getting in the car, and only a very few came into the house. We left small cairns everywhere, as if we might need to find our way back. (There was also, for years, a pile of sticks in the front porch, because bitter experience had led to the implementation of a no-sticks-in-the-house policy.) But four people each bringing “very few” pebbles into a house several times a week still means a lot of stones to sort when you come to move house after a few years, and, having loved that house and that place, weeping as I packed, I didn’t discard many. Their abundance spoke of the ease we’d known on the shoreline there, the way the kids had done some growing up on the coast path and the beaches, the way we’d walked home from school every day along a national trail that some people waited all year to hike. We had not had much money, which was part of why we were leaving, but we’d had other kinds of wealth that we would not have again.
And so I brought the pebbles. And so we paid movers to drive stones across England, where we lived in a landlocked city where we had more money and better education and jobs and healthcare, which do matter, which do improve your life, I’m not suggesting that we should all throw infrastructure to the winds and live on fresh air and mysticism. Inasmuch as you can ever tell, it probably wasn’t the wrong decision. I put the pebbles in a big glass bowl in the new kitchen, but they weren’t the same, so far from the sea, they were just minerals and nostalgia.
