Words for Wednesday

Words for Wednesday

Delores from ‘The Feathered Nest’ offers six words as a writing prompt – tissue, cemented, boardwalk, rolling, bubbles, balding. Why not visit her and see what other writing has been prompted?

‘I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky . . . ’ John Masefield’s poem evokes such a romantic vision of the sea but the reality, on these overcrowded shores, is often very different.

If you are lucky enough to find a sandy beach the boardwalk is likely to be splintered and in need of repair. Then comes the search for a spot to dump all the essentials for a day at the seaside – the windbreaks, the cool box, the folding chairs . . . ah, there’s a place, just there, between the pale, balding man and his brassy wife and noisy offspring and the loving young couple who are oblivious of everyone else, cemented to each other in a most unseemly way.

In that peculiarly British way you will then avoid any eye contact as you lever yourself and your family into a space smaller than your sitting room sofa and proceed to unpack your belongings, At last you can relax and enjoy the waves rolling in, bubbles of foam tipping the crests. ‘White horses’ you tell your children and they giggle, then ask if they can go and paddle.

‘Of course you can,’ you say and accompany them to the water’s edge to find that the ‘white horses’ are formed from cast-off tissue. Not only that, it’s tissue you would normally find in the bathroom, wound around cardboard tubes. Hastily, you grab your children’s hands and promise them ice-creams as you swear that next time you fancy a trip to the coast you will look first at the list of Blue Flag beaches.