My feeling towards this area currently consists of a palpable sense of dread and wonder. One is not advised to dawdle or totter here, or suffer some spectral concussion. If such were to occur one can soon be sure to be caressed very keenly by an encircling horde of inquisitive pincers.

I am continually haunted by this place and it never completely leaves my thoughts. Indeed, I wish to be so haunted. An anxious, grubby death amidst seabird honk and the mutant thorns of a July copse. Spreadeagled over a sandstone wall rougher than any sailor's calloused hand.

I am absolutely consumed by the Angus Coast and proudly so. To be welcome there or indeed unwelcome is a boon. To awaken there at twilight and discover the advance of an unkindly tide, is wise, or unwise if one holds the alien dream of a normal life in high regard. Yet if one is lucky in such a place, in that tumbling world of long gathering stone; the pebble reaches seemingly fathomless, then one is lucky as never before and it moves me so deeply that I cannot truly write of it. Even if no other truly understands how I experience that resultant thrill then I can be contented knowing it still.

It is pure and I am of it exactly as it is of me. My salty blood brushing the gaudy roofs of my veins in time to the swing of cowled wavelets. Musically mine and if you listen....dear reader, you too can hear the swoosh, the swing, the hush and the lick, of the bone in the gristled wing as the gull flits from wreck to wreck.......

My two major finds in the area: a whorled jasper-agate, and an orbicular agate possibly after Rhyolite or oolitic limestone, have all been made preceding a period of strife, which, looking slant into the twilight, I might see as a price or in another night-wards glance just a result of chance. I have not been able to go of late, my life now is not best suited to be tumbling through that reddish land daydreaming alight and burning briskly through many brethren twilights and merry mornings. I wish it to be again, I really do.

"The Macabre" to me, is not in any way a negative notion. I've long since done away with the idea that a fascination with morbidity is to be abhorrent in some fashion. As we must be delivered daily from our lively dreaming to our terrors and toils, so it is that brother death looms large on every page of the dank book that is life. Or perhaps its rather more a clammy tome in some regards. Brother Death's shadow need not remind us of the finite realism that is the sour jolt that one grits one's teeth against, but rather that without that inescapable doom we could not ever hope to really live. Celebrate that which makes one afraid, just as you do that which brings you joy. Do not mistake the use of that balance as a wayward sidestep into being consumed by irrational fear. If we were not once fearful, it is safe to say we may indeed never have made it here. Now that life is a little more beige than recent yesteryear; a little more coddled and clean and part of the mildewed snare, it does not mean that in wallowing thigh-wet in fear we are of a negative volition. I am using the archival mind, the old time world web, the skull's interface, woven in flesh and brawn to learn about the self, and that is a little of everyone, and if I may, everything that stirs or swoons, or manufactures even an iota of that which colours the wind. Thought.

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It may be that in future days we might materialize fuel in our vehiculars via a click of the mice fat under our tongues. We might scan every stone on a beach on earth from a scarred sentinel moon, and pluck agates using drones that adhere to every whim. That to me seems hellish. Just as death in this scant society seems so cruel and final. In savage days not so long past we accepted death as one accepts the teat from mother's breast, it was ever close. Now, as with the meat with which one fills one's gut, which is so disassociated from the warm, loving, and thoughtful animals from which it is torn, we live our lives afraid of that which is much more than just a close relation, it is ally to all that lives and must be so.

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Anyway, agates anyone?

In recent times collecting on these shores I have not been so fortunate or indeed so intrinsic. This is a fact that causes me great sadness and frustration. In the few trips I have managed this year (2023 as of writing) I have uncovered little of note, and not truly again become so fully submerged in that landscape. So a haunting thing is all I am, and all I bring. I do not doubt there is more to be found in the Angus stones, and I do not doubt I will be one who does so, in future days that follow on....