Sea Monsters, Part Two

I might have only been able to find some small and fragmented samples of "Sea Monsters" on the beach this year, but a new breed of things seems to be making itself present there, in a very conspicuous way, not solemnly reserved for after-stormy weather. The best time to observe this is just after sunrise during a walk along the beach. Many people with dogs choose to do that in the early morning, so that the dogs have a chance to swim too before the beach gets busy with kids and people who object to dog bathing. They are the people who typically pick up these things, not because they want to clean the beach or necessarily pass them on to someone, but merely because it is almost impossible for anyone not to stop and pick them up. During such a walk you would be sure to come across many forgotten beach toys. People stay on the beach till after sunset, so probably by the time they decide to leave they can hardly see what is been left behind. The toys just lie there on the sand, on the pebbles and amongst the dried seaweed. Most commonly there are plastic rakes, moulds, spades, boats, buckets, cars, balls and so on. What makes them irresistible, even to serious adults, is their bright colours and the way they stand out like huge candies scattered on the beach.

The first time I was aware of this, is when my aunty brought back from her walk a pink plastic spade and a green plastic rake for Aretousa. I thought it was an one-off incident to come across these things, but as the weeks passed by more and more things were brought back. Of course Aretousa was much more taken by these things than any other present bought for her, including her own brand new set of beach toys, which remained almost untouched throughout the summer. Many thoughts passed through my mind then, things like: why do people keep on forgetting and losing their toys week after week? How come that amongst the toys we have been finding we still have not come across the same design twice? How many different designs of rakes and spades are out there? If the toys are not picked up by anyone -which is very rare as by ten thirty in the morning the beach is almost always clean- or if they are left on a bench in the pine forest, then someone will eventually pick them up, pass them on to a kid they know, who will eventually forget them on the beach and so start the circle again. So the beach becomes a place for exchanging toys really, as no one seems to care whether they still have their original set of beach toys or they are just playing with found ones.

A sample of beach toys found within a fortnight

This might have started like a little summer surprise and a treat for a small girl, but it soon turned into a bit of an obsession with me. Every morning I was waiting to see what kind of shape was brought back and what colour and size it would be. I observed that the colours which came up most were, pink, purple, green and orange. They all had a kind of powdery, pastel finish to them, which made them look like some sort of sweets even more. Then a very sad and unreasonable thought came to me about this new kind of "Sea Monsters". When such colourful, useful and fun things lay on the beach on a daily basis, how would any kids be expected to look for the kind of "Sea Monsters" of my childhood? On the beach, with its natural, earthy colours, these objects stand out so much, it is almost offensive to my eyes. My love for natural colours, my inability to apply paint on top of any three dimensional object vaguely resembling a sculpture and my reminiscing of old "Sea Monsters", all rebel against these newcomers. But then, I remember that with a closer look, the pebbles and the sand itself have quite bright colours. My cousins and I used to collect bright pebbles and bring them home. When we reached home they were dry and looked pale and dull. But when we put them under water again all their colours came back to life. Then the most absurd thought came to my mind: what would it take for my small, delicate samples of old style "Sea Monsters" to be noticed on the beach? What if they were the same colours as these beach toys; is that what it takes for a natural shape like that to stand out? Of course, little did I care about other people's perception of painted bits of broken and twisted roots. What I was really interested in was to see if I could bare to paint these things with bright colours and to observe what became of them once painted.

And so, with a few left over wall paints, I started to try and recreate the prominent colours of the toys: pink, light purple, dark purple, orange and green. I got the colour combinations right almost instantly and intuitively for some, but I found it almost impossible to arrive at the very powdery, pale purple used in these toys and the very distinctive green, which seemed to have an enormous amount of yellow in it. It was very important to me that the colours were as close to that of the toys as possible, to recreate this soft, plastic, toy-like feel that is so distinctive and characteristic about them. Dipping the pieces of old fashioned "Sea Monsters" in the paint was actually quite a satisfactory experience, but I only managed to cover two of them completely; the rest remained only half submerged in paint.

After that all that remained for me to do was take them to the beach and see how they looked there.

I really did not know what to think of the pieces of "Sea Monsters" painted and dropped on the beach then, and I still do not know what to think of them now. I only know that I preferred finding the old fashioned "Sea Monsters" the way I did back then and I prefer finding the new, plastic toys the way we did now. But because I remained unsure of what to think of them, I brought a few back to London and what a surprise it was when I saw them laid out on typical London backdrops. They looked more at home here than they ever did covered in paint on the beach and seemingly unaffected by their journey as they were, they fell right into place amongst the colours of London's transport information leaflets. At the end of the holidays we had around four bags full of plastic beach toys, of which we gave away a big portion to friends and acquaintances with children. Near the time when we were preparing to leave, I had the reoccurring dream that I was walking on the beach at sunrise and I was scattering the remaining plastic toys around for the early walkers to find. I almost thought I should do that, but of course never did and they are all still in a bag waiting for Aretousa to play with next summer.