We had another fabulous day on the beach collecting sea glass of colours that spanned the whole spectrum. It takes some imagination and guesswork at the time of picking them up because the vast majority you find are white (or clear) and green, so it’s much of a muchness.
Depending on how long the glass has been in the sea, you get these beautiful in-between colours, where green takes a yellow hue, and brown goes a bit orange. White (or clear) can go a bit blue, while red is the rarest of the lot. Did they ever make red glass back in the day?
Some are rounded while others still have edges, and some look polished while others are rough. The clarity varies too, and every now and again — if you’re lucky, like our son tends to be — you find a piece of glass that has two or even three colours in it, as if several pieces of glass were smashed together and fused by the sea.
There was a bottleworks in Seaham that closed down just over a hundred years ago, but while it operated it used to dump waste glass in the North Sea, so what washes up with each tide is a bit of history that looks rather magnificent when you line it up on a blank piece of white card.
Another great find of ours was the Bully pork scratchings in B&M Bargains. Super, smashing, great! You can’t beat a bit of Bully pork scratchings. Fair play to the brand and design team, they’ve got it all there on the packaging. When it comes to pork scratchings, you can’t mess around.
As a post-script to the weekend — since we were in the area (and since our son had already had his photo take outside of St James’ Park in Newcastle) — we decided to swing by the Stadium of Light in Sunderland and the Riverside in Middlesbrough on our way home as our mission to visit every football league ground makes a relatively mild start.
