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.
