103
Pebble On the Sand

I stood on the beach, one morning, and suddenly realised (for the first time?) that one of the nicest things about being away so much was that I came home so often. I'd never thought to hear myself say that, after spending the first 35 years of my life as a nomad, never able to understand the love of others for home and hearth. I still couldn't live and work in the same place, day and year in and out, but I had discovered the joy of knowing that place, a point where all axes cross, called "home" (or casa, dom, ev, familiare, foyer, ham, hame, heem, heim, heimr ... whatever). Home built around one person, warm love still asleep at the end of my walk, but now tied also to geography

Isn't it grand?

Walking with the dog, I caught myself staring at Steep Holm island as it pulled itself out of the dawn murk over the Bristol Channel. Dawn arrives most naturally in the opposite direction, eastward, over the 'sixties fortress style architecture of the police station, but most satisfyingly to the west, over the sea.

Pick up a pebble on the sand:
It knows my hand.

As I stared at Steep Holm I suddenly wondered why I did so; and the answer is that I see it as an embodied symbol of mystery made solid. That's rather strange, really, since the island is not unknown to me. I've been out there three times. I once camped on it for a month; tramped all of its paths and tracks, came to know its rhythms and wildlife, woke daily to the sound of surf and crying gulls, the smell of salt and heather and guano. Yet, despite that, as I watch it change with the seasons and the light I feel an undeniable sense that I have never been there, that it holds all that is strange and wonderful.

I taught the sea my song ...

Steep Holm itself obviously isn't unique; it's just my own particular tag on which to hang this feeling of "home". I wonder what tags other inhabitants of Weston feel? Or people who live elsewhere? And are there people in Cardiff or Barry, the other side of the Channel, staring at Steep Holm from the opposite side, hanging their own feelings on it?