A walk along the beach in Dublin fills me with feelings of loss…

We’re walking along Dollymount Strand on Bull Island in Dublin, and it’s almost unbearable. Everyone else is having a gay old time: merrily woofing Golden Labracockerboodles, retired maths teachers in dry robes. They’re gazing out at the vast vista of Irish Sea or across to the classily red-and-white striped towers of Poolbeg, getting their steps in, planning cheese toasties with former school friends, now happily divorced and ready to rumble on HRT. But I, an Artist, am melancholy. Is that sand in my eye? No, I’m crying, thanks very much.

Because, for some of us, beaches equal loss. I don’t mean nostalgic memories of pastel childhood holidays, or the white sands of long-torched honeymoons. I mean actual losses. There is physically no way – and believe me, I’ve tried – to bring home all the interesting objects one encounters on a simple stretch of grey Dublin Bay grit. Naturally I filled my pockets every day with razor clam shells, huge chambered whelks and blunted pewter oysters, each more important and special than the last, but the thought of the treasures I missed still haunts me. Three sea urchin shells (actually the magnificently named Sea Potatoes) crumbled in my clumsy paws. I left behind a ball of dried whelk-egg cases and a ray egg-case, or Mermaid’s Purse, where they lay in the crushed-shell car park. 

Back home, in the London Library, an oasis of wisdom in the protein-shake of wealth and philistinism that is St James’s, I leaf through books about the sea-shore, and realise that I have wasted my life. I know nothing of the internal structure of Baltic clams. Starfishes’ feet are their lungs; limpets rasp their food with a ribbon set with 2,000 tiny teeth; you can age oysters by their rings, like tree-trunks. Think of the glorious tropical shells I’ve ignored, the rare treasures ungathered. I recall some of the beaches of my past, the pebbles I gathered at the expense of common piddocks, and despair.

What happened to the long bleached bone that accidentally came home with me, in my rucksack, where I’d put it, from Donegal? I never walk along a shoreline without searching for a fat chunk of greenish sea-glass with an embedded wire. My grandfather found its original on holiday, when I was little, brought it all the way home for me, and I lost it. I will never get him, or it, back; I can’t stop hoping that I might. Then again, I also lost the autograph Cary Grant gave me, in person, when I was around that age, so it’s par for the course.

Elizabeth Bishop nailed it: sometimes it feels one has lost everything. I’ll never again be carried by my father after slicing open my toe in a rock-pool, a scarlet trail across the rocks like paint. I won’t sing Molly Malone with my own children in a hot car on seaside holidays. They, in young adulthood, have willingly forgotten that time. I’ll never see an Irish hare on Bull Island; once rampant, now chased away. 

Walking back to the car among dried gorse skeletons, bleached snail-shells beached in the silky sand, boggy pools and a few surprising hummocks of wild violets, I kept wondering what the windblown tussocks of hay-coloured dry grasses reminded me of. Now I have it: a two decades old memory of the shape of the crown in the hair of my small son, seen from above. I’d swap all of it, each shell, each stone, each treasure, for another sight of that.