We Are A Sea. Sunday 29th September 2024.
Today Pebble Dash edged into the realms of legitimacy: we got t shirts printed sponsored kindly by We Are A Wave – a festival? A sponsored project? Whatever it is it celebrates local people practising active hope in the face of adversity. We took the money and now have t shirts with the website emblazoned in the hope some of you might join us. Now we haven’t been doing this long so there is a distinct pong of impostor syndrome here. Plenty of people clean the beach and or try and raise awareness of the problem and its causes. From Emma (instagram: pickingupplaatichastings) who makes art installations out of the mess left behind, to Pierre the council beach cleaner who is out in all weathers, both forensically plucking the shingle of the detritus. We seek no limelight, we just want a run and a cleaner beach. It’s a fun run, and a bit of therapy perhaps.
The individual clouds are picked out in lines by dawn light like bulk carrier train carriages at a huge railway sidings stretching off on a pink glowing horizon toward a terminus at Beachy head. It’s definitely autumn, there is a crispness and I’ve heard the mushrooms have started to show in the remaining woodland we have nearby.
I’m late and Stu is already on the hoof, bag in hand. My middle aged competitiveness rises unimpressively and I start a light canter after him. I’m late because I practised bad sleep hygiene as I’m told it’s called. I went to bed listening to updates from Lebanon and the most recent round of bombings in Beirut and the escalations around the world. I allowed the voices of global conflict into my more porous nighttime space, where one’s mind and perhaps soul is more open and easily lead. When I should have been drifting off into slumber to let the my brain disengage from the world, my eyes, ears, mouth, nose, skin and most critically my brains conscious machinations, to do the days defragging it needs to do from a day of stimuli, I continued to stuff it full of information of the worst kind. Literally a glutton for punishment, unable to look away like the restrained Droog of Clockwork Orange.
How futile our individual efforts to heal ourselves and the life around us when structures of destruction are so profitable, war – the ultimate exercise in littering – proliferating and metastasising. I was guided back to sleep and off the bulletins in the early hours with words from Mia Mottley the PM of Barbados and the most brave and outspoken leader in these times of abject servility to destructive power. In address to assembled leaders of the global majority (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ia1DfHmxtHw&t=1s&pp=ygUMbWlhIG1vdHRsZXkg) that is worth a listen in it’s 15minute entirety, the words that stuck with me were “This world can change but it needs our energy and our commitment…and demands that we do not seek comfort in ignoring what we see and what we hear. We must not become desensitised.” And whilst it is easy to mock my trying to link global war, greed and indifference all the way back to the litter on our beaches (I mock myself for making these vain glorious linkages) it doesn’t mean they aren’t true. And besides, it’s my way of coping and that is enough for the hour in the morning that I practise this.
Todays run the bingo bell got rung several times, the first time for: One perfectly intact Croc. To carry on a thread from a previous run on the subject of Dead White Mens Clothes I have seen whole businesses in west Africa based on single shoes, traders who specialise in bulk discarded shoes where one rummages for a pair that match enough. I’m also reminded of the De Sica film The Tree Of Wooden Clogs (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v6LAOc3M6b0&pp=ygUUdHJlZSBvZiB3b29kZW4gY2xvZ3M%3D) in which 19th century Europeans are depicted so poor that they can’t afford shoes and are driven to cut down a tree belonging to their landlord to make some clogs for their child leading to their eviction and presumably abject pauperisation. A shoe in terms of human civilisational development is an incredible thing, a luxury, perhaps even the difference between life and death in some cases.
The bell rang again for bagged dog shit (who the AF are you who bags it and then drops it?!) a lighter, a vintage Raleigh scooter, a pack of soy sauce (I might have that with my breakfast to replace my electrolytes) and an actual bauble.
Total run time 53 mins. See you on the next dash.
