The pleasures of pebble-spotting

P-p-pick up a pebble. Feel its weight in your palm. Roll it over under your thumb. Any good? Not sure? Shuck it back on the shingle. Plenty of fish in the sea and more pebbles still on the shore.

In The Pebbles on the Beach: A Spotter’s Guide, Clarence Ellis, pebble-spotter par excellence, opens with the words: ‘Most people collect something or other: stamps, butterflies, beetles, moths, dried and pressed wildflowers, old snuffboxes, china dogs and so forth. A few eccentrics even collect bus tickets! But collectors of pebbles are rare.’ We are not talking about the common or garden or indeed communal garden collector of pebbles – the sort with a wheelbarrow and a trowel. A true pebble-spotter does not make off with cartloads to resurface the driveway. ‘Let us hasten to add,’ Mr Ellis hastens to add, ‘that we mean discriminating collectors.’

Men such as Jim Ede, founder of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, who made his house a home for modern art, sculpture and pebbles. ‘The Louvre of the Pebble,’ the poet Ian Hamilton Finlay called it. Ede was particular about pebbles. ‘You find a perfect pebble once in a generation,’ he proclaimed. At Kettle’s Yard he assembled a spiral of nearly perfectly spherical pebbles. When a friend of a friend sent him a pebble she thought would do, he sent his regrets: ‘Mighty kind,’ but ‘I’m an awfully difficult pebble fiend’. The pleasure wasn’t in the possession so much as the spotting, the stooping, the picking up, the polishing with a pocket handkerchief.

In the introduction to his biography of Augustus John, Michael Holroyd raises the question of ‘invasion’ – the ways a subject gets under a biographer’s skin. While writing a biography of Ede, Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists, I became a pebble fiend and an awfully difficult one at that.