* On the (pebble) beach this afternoon, an old bloke with a metal detector presumably looking for dropped coins; I’m not sure if that counts as desperation or simply persistence. He didn’t find any that I saw.
* On the steps of the Palais de Justice last night, a group of young men drinking. One of them accidentally kicked a bottle down the steps and it shattered at the bottom. He solemnly got a plastic bag and picked up at least the biggest of the piece before putting them in a bin – not what you’d see in London…
* Strolling along the pebbles under an almost full moon, I absent-mindedly picked up a sea-smoothed rock that would have made a perfect pestle, smooth and comfortable in the hand: when you think about it, while it is archaeologically unrecoverable, the first tool wasn’t those shaped by (semi-)human hands, but when a hominid, or an even earlier creature, first picked up an implement, found it good, and carried it with them with intent for future use. Probably a long way back – possibly even a dinosaur, this piece suggests.
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