STONE BALANCING

I spent an hour or so of one of my days last week just lying on a rocky beach and balancing stones. I’m sure that there’s nothing unusual in that and that it’s quite a common thing to be doing but, as far as I can recall, this was the very first time I had ever actually done it.

I suppose that it’s just never occurred to me before, perhaps because I’ve never been all that interested in “beach” holidays, and I can only suspect that it’s got something to do with some of my more recent reading which has attempted to open my eyes to the small beautiful things of life and persuade me to embrace them. This, as anyone who’s read much of these witterings will realise, is no mean feat.

Anyway, we arrived on a cloudy beach in the middle of the morning on an unpromising day and there were already families set up with windbreaks and deckchairs and buckets and spades ready for their own day of glorious inactivity. Our own preparations seemed somewhat lacking in comparison as they basically involved having a few supermarket sandwiches sitting in a cool bag in the car, alongside showerproof coats in case it rained. But then we hadn’t really come for their kind of day at the beach. What we had come for, I suppose, was a chance to relax a little, maybe watch some birds and explore the nature reserve that the beach was part of, and in that we succeeded magnificently.

So we sat ourselves down on the shingle and, possibly remembering a few photographs I’d seen decorating the walls of cafes or hotels, or maybe some pictures I took myself of a similar stack when I came across such a structure whilst walking on another beach on another year, I found myself starting to balance one stone on top of another. Then I added another and another, and pretty soon I found myself getting totally absorbed in becoming one with the rock as I struggled with the knotty little problem of keeping the whole lot in equilibrium as I attempted to add yet another.

It was kind of like playing solitaire “beach jenga” if you will, but it did have the added benefit of focusing the mind and making all the other cares just drift away for a while. Occasionally just a slight breeze would send the whole thing toppling back to chaos, and equally sometimes a tower on the very brink of collapse would suddenly become stable by the simple addition of one small extra pebble.

All very satisfying and calming.

After an hour or so of this, we were surrounded by various little precariously balanced towers of pebbles and rock and we decided that it was time to move on, which we carefully did, managing to creep away without causing a mass collapse. I briefly wondered how long these things might actually survive the comings and goings of an ordinary day on the beach, but I didn’t have to wonder too long as a large family arrived to park themselves like an exploded landmine and scattered themselves across an area much larger than would have seemed possible and the first thing one of their little darlings did was to kick down the piles of stones as he passed them by.

It wasn’t unexpected. In fact, when I was a small child I suspect I would have done much the same, but it did remind me of an observation I once heard about so many people spending so much time making pretty things only for someone else to come along and smash them. Perhaps human beings are fundamentally just like that. I had, of course, hoped that, like I had myself on that other year, coming across an enigmatic pile of stones would cause someone to pause and wonder about them for a moment, but that was probably too much to expect or hope for. After all, sometimes a pile of stones is just a pile of stones, and when you’ve seen one, you’ve probably seen them all, and perhaps we are all just preprogrammed to break the things that aren’t precious to us personally.

Anyway, I stomped on his sandcastle later on, so the balance of the universe was maintained.

No, I didn’t really, but I imagine that there would have been a hullaballo if I had done, after all, even if one person’s carefully constructed sandcastle is just a pile of sand to someone else, and even if it’s true that the sea will always win eventually anyway, for that particular moment, a child’s personal Camelot is the most important thing in the world to them, especially if they’ve spent some time together as a family building it and building themselves a precious memory.