We parked the car and spent a carefree hour on the beach, Oscar and I. The beach was a crescent of pebbles three miles long, and we were the only people on it. A recent easterly gale had driven the tide much further up the beach than usual, leaving behind it a pebble ridge, ideal for granddads and two-year-old boys to fling themselves off, or roll down roly-poly fashion, which we did until granddad was exhausted.
Next we searched for suitable pieces for the driftwood bookcase granddad is making, and found a frayed and salted plank of eight by two. Just the job. Nearby, a stranded dogfish lay stinking among the tide-line debris. Its eyeballs were gone, its rotting flesh eaten away by scavengers right down to the exposed vertebrae, which granddad snatched up and pretended to greedily gnaw at.
We’d wandered far up the beach in search of driftwood and it was a long trudge back to the car park.
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