I hold it in my hands and feel its weight. A large flint, the size of a child's head, but slightly elongated and depressed on one side. The ends fit in my two palms and the curve gives a natural orientation as if it were made to be held by me. Along the sea front are sculptures in wood, cast iron and stone, all are made to touch and explore, play in, ponder on, but somehow this holds me more.

Behind me the new-risen sun hangs heavy too in a thick low morning mist. The moon ahead is more distinct set higher against the already blue sky.

And behind me the east pier is already lost in the mist, only a few indistinct lines of roller-coaster and helter-skelter sketch where the pier-end fun fair floats above the waters.

I put the stone down beside the path. I would find it easily on my return, none of the other shingle compare to this in size and the linen-textured flint-white stands against the pink-fawn of the pebbles.

Ahead of me is the west pier emerging slowly through the clinging sea cloud. Yesterday in a clear cold sharp sea breeze morning it had appeared to me like a spent chrysalis, its occupant now flown and just the shell behind, echoing tea parties and summer dances, children playing, patient fishers on pier end, and young lovers watching the sunset.

But today it seems more like an insect itself, where the pier has half collapsed the cast iron beams of the superstructure lie like legs at odd angles and the pavilion itself, the foyer and two sections of roof are like head, abdomen and thorax. And where the domed entrance-way sinks through the broken boards it seems as if it were eating its way inexorably through the remainder of the pier, to grow and leave its children to eat the hotels, chip shops and deck chairs of the sea front.

On the shore by salvaged fragments of rust encrusted pier pillars is a notice. A scheme to restore the pier. It ends "the dream of a few and the wish of many" as if dreams were more tangible than wishes, but here made solid through millenium fund, public grants and a new commercial complex. The notice is dated April 2002, work to start in autumn 2002 ... when the pier collapsed. The waves claim their own.

Walking back into the sun. Through the mist, not a small disk, but a luminous patch spread through the cloud, bled out like water colour, yet when I look away or close my eyes, spots shine. Although I cannot see it consciously my eyes can see and remember the sun through the glare.

And the stone, beside the path where I left it, inviting me, drawing me in. Again I am captured by its weight its fitness for my hands. On the upper surface are two broad grooves worn by wave and sand through the rough white outer skin of the flint to the smooth glass-shiny inner flint core. I want to take it with me, to hold on to, to share: "feel this, hold it", make us all more solid through knowing it.

Flint, tying me back to those neolithic flint nappers, shaping axe head and arrow tip. Perhaps the first heavy industry, flint heads travelled hundreds of miles across Britain and Europe, trade routes taking them outwards and sun-sourced Etruscan wines finding their way to rain-soaked northern Britain. Precursor to blast furnace and theme park, nuclear power station and MTV.

But older still, how do these form: bubbles rising through fluid rock, or seeded and growing like pearls. Older then pier, sea front and striped swimming costumed figures running from victorian bathing huts. Born in the depths of the earth - you knew me when I was yet dust.

And looking from side to side, the rising sun sucks out yet more vapours from the sea. Storm flung shingle terraces seem more like cloud banks than sand, distance is confused and each beach structure and kiosk looms mysterious partly formed and in its unformedness prompts its own primal meanings. The two piers are lost in the thickening fog and the world closes around, town and world shrinking down and the beach remains as it has before pier or Pliocene man.

I hold it and turn it one more time.

I cannot take all this with me. I put the stone down and leave it where it belongs.

Saturday 1st March 2003

a tree by Windermere

Friday 4th April 2003

fionnphort

Friday 19th April 2003

Good Friday