Christopher Stocks

Island Life

Chesil close up

November 25th, 2010

Graeme Walker, artist, country, morris man and mummer and curator of the Brighton Pebble Museum, arrived on Monday to see Chesil Beach for himself: after a slap-up cream tea at the Lobster Pot on Portland Bill we headed down to the beach and spent a chilly hour sifting through pebbles and collecting kindling for the fire.

Graeme found a stone that sadly turned out to be less suited to a bottle-opener than it appeared, but there were plenty of others worth looking at, subtly different yet quite distinct in their material: dark-red jasper from Devon, dark grey limestone as finely grained as a polished piece of hardwood, pale grey pebbles with vibrant orange inclusions, pebbles decorated with mysterious markings like charcoal hieroglyphics, all blended together by their soft salt glaze. If we give too much value to objects that cost a lot of money to buy, perhaps we give too little to those that are free – though, like pebbles, they are at least as satisfying and beautiful in themselves.

London rock

November 14th, 2010

London may seem remote from the Isle of Portland – and not just physically, as anyone who’s endured the interminable three-hour train journey can attest, but in so many other ways as well. Yet whenever I’m in London these days I only have to raise my eyes above the shopfronts to be reminded of home, for when you start to look it’s quite staggering how much of the West End and the City is built of (or at least faced with) Portland stone.

I’d always taken the often-repeated claim that there’s more Portland stone in London than there is left on Portland itself with a large pinch of salt, but spend a couple of days walking round town and you start wondering how there’s anything left of the island at all.

Take Regent Street, for example. Its entire length is faced in Portland stone, from the tippety top of Portland Place to the bottom of Pall Mall, but it’s astonishing how many major buildings began life on my island too: St Paul’s, the Banqueting House, the main front of Buckingham Palace, Waterloo Bridge, the Bank of England, the Ministry of Defence, the Liberal Club, the Monument – not to mention pretty much every Wren church there is.

Funny to think that Somerset House is made from exactly the same stone as my house, if rather more finely finished…

Hidden beauties

September 18th, 2010

It’s been a particularly good year for autumn ladies’ tresses, those miniature orchids whose whorls of ivory-white flowers give them their evocative name. Walking to Portland Bill last weekend we had a second look at a wonderful large colony of them, well over a thousand in all, growing (as orchids often seem to do) in a most unpromising and not especially attractive spot. But for the first time we also noticed scattered examples dotted along the cliffs all the way to the Bill.

They seem to thrive – or at least be able to survive – on the most closely-bitten turf, even right on the cliff edge, in the teeth of the fiercest winds and the windblown salt; everywhere else they’re out-competed by more vigorous grasses and larger plants. If you lie down and get close enough to them their minute flowers smell faintly sweet too, with the slightest hint of vanilla – or at least that’s what they smelled like to me.

Tread softly because you tread… eeurgh

August 14th, 2010

Some friends of ours came to visit a while back and were amazed (if that’s the right word) by the remarkable amount of dog crap that decorates the paths and pavements of Portland. In fact they found the number of these foul faecal heaps – piled, smeared, spattered, splurged, carefully bagged then casually flung –  so overwhelming that by the time they left they had a new name for Portland: Turd Island.

Now, Portland certainly has plenty of dogs, but the odd thing is that all the dog-owners I see always seem to pick up their pooches’ poo and take it away with them. So where does this surfeit of shit come from?

Some, no doubt, from the occasional dog you see snuffling around without any sign of its owner, but most of it must be left by dog-walkers who sneak out so early in the morning, or late in the evening that no one else catches them at it – which at least suggests they know that what they’re doing is pretty foul and antisocial. Which begs the question, why?

Feathered fiends

April 16th, 2010

Living by the sea it’s hard not to have a love-hate relationship with our commonest (and noisiest) neighbours, the herring gulls. Hate when you’ve just hung a white sheet out on the line and they crap all over it, or somehow hover en masse above your car to cover it generously from top to bottom in their paint-stripping excrement. Hate when their dawn chorus wakes you up at 5am with a massed screeching that could rouse the dead. Hate the idiots who persist in feeding them, even though they’re easily the most successful scavengers around and there are far too many of them already.

But at the same time they’ve got as much character as Cockney cab drivers and they’re fascinating to watch. Fix one with a stare and it responds with a shifty look, as if it just happened to be passing and wasn’t up to anything, honest Guv. Living in such close proximity to them offers a rare chance to observe them up close right through the year, to learn a bit of their language and to enjoy some of their odder quirks – like staring thoughtfully at their own feet for minutes at a time. They make excellent weather-vanes too if you’re not sure of the wind direction.

It’s mating season right now, and the air is filled with the distracting, and rather revolting sound of seagulls shagging, the male balancing on top of the female (often on a chimney top) and flapping his wings while uttering an all too distinctive series of squawks that can be heard for streets around – talk about exhibitionism. In a few weeks, of course, we’ll have the chicks (two to three to a nest, many of which die in the first few weeks, usually by falling off roofs), and their incessant, night and day squeaking is going to be driving us mad till they finally learn to fly in mid summer. And that’s another story entirely.

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