SEA HERE ....

It’s World Ocean Day today and I woke to a glorious picture from our youngest, currently at the house in Argyll.  It isn’t of blue skies and gentle seas.  It isn’t even of wild tempests and flying spume.  It’s of a soft, grey day of gentle rain falling onto a slatey sea loch, and it’s that part of the world on my favourite kind of day.   The hours I have spent on that foreshore as child, adult and parent, in – believe me – all weathers, are countless.  Starfish, anemones, sea pinks, limpets, mussels and their tiny, valueless but priceless pearls – all have been spotted and identified and picked over and and many have made their way at various times into the house and then the car and suitcases and pockets and back to the south, where one day I hope an archaeologist will be baffled by their presence in this very inland part of Lincolnshire.  The Starfish and Crabs from up there have been immortalised in our designs (as have the Beach Huts of Lincs and Norfolk) and one of Isobel’s properly good and earliest paintings was of a mackerel from Loch Creran.   I still have it, signed with a very juvenile squiggle, over my desk.  It’s a great reminder of a lovely day spent on the water when everyone was much smaller.  Our ineptitude was epic – that poor thing must be considered the unluckiest fish on the west coast - but it tasted wonderful, and there it still is, immortalised in oil and pastels.  Not such a bad end perhaps, after all.