Ballyquintin beach, the day after Samhain.

There had been a full moon, and some severe weather across the Irish sea. We'd had strong winds, but nothing like Wales and southern England had experienced. On top of that, Susan and I had come to the caravan on Samhain, aka Halloween, the day when the veil between the human world and the otherworld is drawn aside. So when we walked down to the beach the next morning I was expecting things to be a little different. And they were.

The tide had come right up the strand, depositing massive, heaped, lines of seaweed. Mixed in amongst the algae, the debris of human activity: a glove, an old toothbrush, fragments of nets and ropes, a fragile slip of purple plastic clinging tenuously to some wrack. The tender violence of the tide had combined and juxtaposed the artificial and the natural into temporary sculptures.