Along the edge of the tideline.
Shuffling along the winter tideline, layered in strata of sweaters and a damp anorak, I finally spotted what I was looking for; a small, rounded translucent orange pebble maybe 1cm across. It winked seductively at me from a pungent bed of rotting seaweed. I was thrilled. It was my first piece of North Sea amber.
I didn’t find amber often, just regularly enough to keep me coming back to the beach near my home in all weathers, stumbling along -eyes to the ground- oblivious to the cold and rain.
It was one of my nerdier phases as a kid -and God knows I had some really sad ones. When my teenage buddies were leafing through torn copies of girly magazines and puffing on illicit ciggies down the alley behind Woolworths in Ramsgate, I could be found grubbing about on the beach looking for fossils and amber. (Yeah, well, mildly inaccurate. I did have a well-thumbed magazine stuffed under the mattress and I had started smoking at 14, so all is not lost.)
