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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