Rock, Stone, Pebble, Sand

No, not a variation on the old game of rock, paper, scissors that has settled so many of life's great questions.

When the water is cold and the air is fresh, it's always good to get down to the shore, that odd half-land between the green and the blue.

It is a place of silvers and greys: stripes of white quartz, flecked granites and rusty sandstones. Hard rock, smoothed, rounded and polished by the sea and endless time, lies strewn along the crest of the bay.

Perhaps not so haphazardly after all. The ocean and its moods sift the stones by size, moving them slowly up and down the beach, never ceasing its work.

As children we longed for the beach, with its white sand and scattered shells, but once there it was the rocky foreshore that offered endless adventures.

There was the windfall of fishing buoys, rope and creels. There was sun-bleached but still readable jetsam, ferried in by the sea from who knows where. We were always hoping for a message in a bottle, cast on the tide from some distant place, carrying the wishes and hopes of a person we would never meet.

We hunted the rocks and pebbles for a heart-shaped stone or a hag stone.

We searched for secret marks, left of course by a buccaneer to signal the hidden chink or crack where jewels, looted gold or cutlasses lay concealed, never to be returned for.

We scavenged for sea glass and for odd-shaped pebbles that looked like animals, or tractors, trunks and cars when angled and held just so.

A beautiful, smooth stone that simply felt good in the hand. And all the while we picked out fantastical, opalescent shells to give to Mum on our return to the sandy beach.

A palette of pebbles filled our coat pockets to bursting and weighed down unworn hats, each with a cry of "just this one more", to be taken home and painted as ladybirds or Halloween spiders.

Frosted sea glass, taken home and arranged as a memory for years to come.

Pebbles, each collected by little hands and chosen by feel from a star-strewn shore.

Then came the careful stacking, stone upon stone, to build the highest, most impressive, teetering cairn on a rocky outcrop overlooking a tranquil shore.

We wondered whether it would last a day, a week or a month, a standing memory of the careful, methodical work of a young tower builder.

The greatest pleasures in life are usually the simplest. Days spent out in nature build the soul and feed the spirit. These are the days of our lives.