Potential Mutant Boy Cameos

That morning a man was running up the hill, past me who was hurriedly walking down the hill.

“Lovely here”, he said.
“Yeah!” I agreed and then I realised he’d said “lovely hair”, and I'd just agreed my hair was lovely.

“Keep on shining!” he said.

That evening though, I headed down Trig Stairs. Low tide was over an hour ago so there was a smaller piece of foreshore.

I saw a butterfly fluttering by, and picked up tiny purple sherds.



I headed across to the foreshore by Blackfriars after that.
“Have you found anything good?” a man with a group of people following him asked me.
“No,” I said, shaking my head, but really everything is good.



Looking at my finds, I picked up some flint, some little bits of glass, various sherds, including a marbled handle from something.

I moved what I'd found a previous time and turned over one rock and then it had a face!

A goose waddled up to me, inquisitively. The other geese, mostly Canada geese and a few goslings, lay on the beach, and I tried to avoid going close to them. The swans also loomed large. It was as if the swans and geese were guarding a patch of foreshore. When the tide went out a bit, I cautiously moved between them and the foreshore, not wanting to scare them away. “It's okay,” I told one goose, ”it's okay”.

One man, who I thought must be a pro mudlarker, quickly reached the third beach along when the tide was still fairly up, but it seemed that when he got there, he just took his top off and sunbathed on his own private beach, and I'm not sure he was mudlarking at all. A second man tried to get to the third beach along but wasn't paying enough attention to the boats and the waves splashed at him and he ran back.

I saw an ant.

The Canada geese swam away in a line and I watched as they floated past on the waves.

A white butterfly fluttered around the foreshore.

People were paddling in the Thames.

I was picking up pottery sherds.

A man said, “hello”, but I wasn’t sure if it was to me, as my back was to him and the sound of the waves splashing on the shore was loud at that point, and I didn't look around.

I found a lot at Limehouse:

A button, a cowrie shell, a stone that says “oy”, the most squiggly piece of combware I’ve found so far, a sherd that would have said “Staffordshire England” and another sherd that says “pottery”.

I like the colours of the pottery and glass I find in Limehouse - the sherds that are pale pinks and blues and yellows, and the glass that is light blue.

It was nice to walk by the river on a hot day and the foreshore at Blackfriars was entirely mine to start with, but then it suddenly got busy with people: children picking up stones and throwing them into the river, people taking photos, people sitting on the beach, and so on.

I did not pick up the blue Croc that is still at the top of the Pile, nor the coat-hanger, nor the bricks that say Starworks on them, which it seems are from Glenboig in Scotland.

I did pick up a sticker that says “trick or treat” and a star that was also probably once a sticker, and my first Lego brick! It's a little blue one.

I also found a cute piece of combware, and two larger pieces of misshapen greenish sherds that look like they may once have been part of the same thing. At first I thought one of them was a crab.