There’s a shock of heavy rain in Hove. Shocking to be drenched, just as the bridesmaids blossoming in the middle of the pavement outside Tesco are shocking - marshmallow froufrous breathing beneath the glowing orange sign. The sign is dead. The pink trees are alive. But the sign is pretending to be alive. And just so, cities call into question, like screens, what passes for conscious.
I walk down the beach and see faces in the stones. It’s impossible to be sure they aren’t lost souls caught on some maritime battlefield and washed up to stare us into questioning everything. I can’t take them all home. So I photograph them. Then I find someone else has been doing the same. If anyone knows the answer to these petrified emotions winking from the earth – please tell me.
The laughing stones and crying stones say – you’re blessed to be breathing, walking peacefully under a moon so low and full you want to knock on the windows of strangers to make them come see, but instead it’s you and the dog in the churchyard after dark, trying not to think about the war children blessed to be breathing and the politics creeping under the skin of the earth like a plague.
So it means more than you could know, strangers on the beach, to see you brave the water in groups laughing into the icy waves all limbs and hats and squeals. Or you, lone souls, staring out, in silent dialogue. And all you friends who meet to talk in the wind.
Peace is a clean dry towel. Peace is a morning of quiet reading. Peace blossoms the heart with froufrou. Peace is disturbance finding a way to breathe through us, and move on.
Can’t stop listening to this.
Still thinking, along with the rest of Britain, about this.
Forever grateful for this.