Splayed and blanched-white pails are passed from one pair of expectant hands to another. Crisp and shell-like these conic forms are nestled upside down, one within the next. They call to mind overgrown peonies, frilled eruptions opening themselves up to us for the filling.

scwtch – scwtch – scwtch

fud-thwt 

flump 

I fill and pat and flip and wonder how many millions of castle-shaped buckets have been filled along this bay? How many names temporarily scrawled on its shore? How many stones thrown, spades buried, sticks fetched, shells collected, rearranged, and pocketed? How many bottles washed ashore, nets caught and knotted, balls carried away by winds or tides?

scwtch – scwtch – scwtch 

I’d like to fill my buckets with words that I’ve collected, inspected, and run my finger over; words that belong here. I’d like to fill them with memories of this place so that when I turn out my tamped down, second-hand words, they’ll form unsound first-hand mounds. These, I imagine, will amount to a compression of snot-wet-grit-specked upper lips and benumbed bare feet and grizzled skies and overcast waves the colour of week-old bruises. Midnight walks home after closing would be there too, together with (something like) football played at dusk in fits of young and unselfconscious giggles. The bank holiday birthing of my first boy. 

fud-thwt 

flump

Getting the right consistency is crucial, though: too wet and I risk a sloppy dissolution, too dry and a gusty collapse. 

scwtch – scwtch 

fud-thwt – fud-thwt

I’d like to shape my mounds with the ups-and-downs of accented words mouthed here, by there, and endowed by vowels that are extended, open-ended and occasionally curtailed. In my teenage years, when it mattered most, I set to adopting this lolloping rhythm. I later lost it somewhere along the way to here. Now I hear it only occasionally. I can replay it in my mind, though – it’s still there. But when I set to speaking it aloud it isn’t; my mouth is stiff and clumsy, no longer able to form the right shapes to host it.

flump

Hands together; eyes closed: she’s got the whole world in her hands. The last time I sang something close to this refrain I was here, in this same sing-songing city, I mean. Sitting, head down, cross-legged on a sticky lino grey-blue floor I would cast sideways glances around the school hall and the teachers that rimmed it both of which seemed comparatively, unimaginably large. 

scwtch

fud-thwt

This is her way, I suppose, to play between scales of time and dimension. Switching between the unfathomably vast to the familiarly small – from light years to light bulbs – she stages a world, a universe even, in precarious miniature (or is it a precarious world in miniature?). She hands out pieces of it, proxies for it. These five great world formations don’t look like much against the backdrop of the arm-wide expanse of Swansea’s bay, not much at all: more molehills than mountains and fit for glee-filled, two-footed stamping.

flump

Regardless, we dig on. We rearrange grains of sand into shapes that we know to be short-lived before turning to rearrange the contents of our daily lives into shapes that we know to be short-lived. We dig on. It turns out that even her pails exist in passing, degradable, like these words and the sounds and the mounds they make and the worn down mountains on which they’re modelled. Before long, I know, my sand mountains will be toppled from above and sucked from below; they’ll collapse in on themselves, out from under themselves, swept clear by the returning tide. Still, heads down; we dig on.