stones

I have finally and grudgingly changed the blog background to green, since it was the first day of spring a couple of days ago (unless you are the Met Office) and I did briefly remove my fleece today.  I kept my beanie on, though, and was wearing two long sleeved t-shirts and a Musto thermal polo neck under a heavy cotton shirt.  That's how warm it was.

The bowl on the hall table where I keep any stones with holes in that I find was beginning to overflow, so I made up another couple of strings of them to hang from the posts by the blue shed. No witches are going to get into that shed, no Sir.  Incidentally, if you want to stop them running along the tops of your hedges the secret is to leave any holly trees uncut, as the witches won't be able to jump over them.

A friend who lives no more than three miles away as the crow flies, on the sandy soil of the Tendring plateau, said plaintively that she didn't have stones with holes in her garden.  Nor did we for many years, until I learned how to see them, so my guess is that she probably has but hasn't looked closely enough.  The holes are almost always blocked with earth when you find the stone, and the knack is to spot the depressions filled with earth that remain when you rub the rest of it off, that might go all the way through because there is a potential exit hole as well.  You will find out when you wash the stone under the kitchen tap, probing at the possible hole with the point of a skewer to scrape the packed soil out.  Sometimes you find you've picked up a dud, and sometimes a small pebble has wedged in the hole and takes a great deal of winkling out.  It is not a good idea to rest the stone in the palm of your hand while probing, just in case resistance suddenly ceases and the skewer shoots forward.

Of course there must be a preliminary stage of recognition, before you start narrowing in on likely spots of earth, to work out which stones are worth looking at more closely, but I don't know how that works.  Like posting messages on Snapchat*, you just recognise them.  Alas, while I have believed since my student days that Wittgenstein posed the question If you wanted to know whether a stone had a mouth, how would you know where to look? I have never been able to track it down since to source.  Or at least, Google has been no help.  I haven't yet resorted to reading the collected works of Wittgenstein.

I didn't find any new stones with holes today, but did discover one that was almost half a geode, a broken flint with a shallow depression on the broken face lined with faintly sparkling crystals of quartz.  Not as smart as the amethyst geodes you see in mineral and gemstone shops, but still good.

*If you are a devotee of the Kermode and Mayo Film Review Programme you will get the reference immediately.  If not, don't worry about it, though you could start listening.  It is easily the best source for keeping tabs on new film releases, and the odd vintage classic.