02/04/2017

Most of today was spent with sand between my toes, pebbles under my feet, on Thorpeness beach. We drove down in the morning, getting inevitably lost on the way and stopping at a little tea house where I had a pretentious tea from a glass teapot (I spilled about 1/9th of it on the table cloth) After we came out of the tea house we drove with the windows down, and my ears are still ringing a little from the whistling wind.

On the beach we skimmed stones, I put my feet into the freezing water for little moments at a time, and then hobbled back over the pebbles to the dry and lay down. Such a vast stony beach with nothing but stones and stones and yet hours of entertainment - skimming stones, throwing stones into a shoe, balancing stones on each other, seeing how many stones I could balance on my face, trying to cover Renny in stones, collecting stones that looked like noses, writing messages to other strangers on the beach on stones and leaving them to be found...

And how can I write about a beach without recalling those lovely heart rending last words of the Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock?

I grow old ... I grow old ... 
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. 

Shall I part my hair behind?   Do I dare to eat a peach? 
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. 
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. 

I do not think that they will sing to me. 

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves 
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back 
When the wind blows the water white and black. 
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea 
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown 
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

This evening I reread a line from T.S Eliot's Murder in a Cathedral, which had attached itself to the bottom of an article I was reading:

This is one moment,/But know that another/Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy.

What is it about T.S Eliot - how do his words so sneakily make their way in to your heart - and wring it so suddenly? Sometimes I cannot read his poems without my heart feeling like weeping.