Casglu Llwch

Gathering Dust
Georgia Ruth

Prologue

This book was supposed to be about music but somewhere along the way I started looking down at stones.

All the same, I still think it’s about music. Everything is connected, and after a while songs and stones aren’t too dissimilar! Or, at least, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

More than anything, I’m writing this so as not to forget...

Georgia Ruth
November 2024

Stones

There was a time, when I was about eight or nine years old, when pet rocks occupied a very specific place in my subconscious. They were most often spoken about in American shows like Even Stevens or Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and because of this I was never entirely sure whether they were real or not. Obviously, nobody really kept pet rocks, did they?

It’s too easy to pick up a phone...

Are pet rocks real?

In less than a second, I have my answer.

They were collectible toys, created in 1975 by a man named Gary Dahl. Sold in special cardboard boxes with breathing holes, they came delicately nestled in a bundle of straw. The fad lasted around six months, before ending abruptly after the Christmas of 1975.

There are pictures. Holy shit, I think, as I look at the fonts on the boxes, and at the stones in their shredded-paper nests. I’ve seen these before. But where?

Each box came with a set of instructions; things you could teach your rock to do. Sit, stay, play dead.

These are Mexican beach stones. Volcanic stones found, as the name suggests, on the beaches of Baja, Mexico. They’re smooth, round, and come in a variety of dark colours. But what’s unique about these stones, compared to any other beach stones, is that they have been hand-collected by specialist collectors. The Mexican government has banned the use of machines – partly to protect the beaches, and partly to generate jobs in seaside towns. And so, each stone has been chosen specially by a person who knows exactly what they are looking for. These stones are perfect for garden planning. They last a lifetime and can withstand the elements: sun, rain, ice or snow.

But like any special thing, they come at a price.

Gary Dahl, however, was willing to take the risk. And it’s a good thing he was, because he made millions from them, before the lava lamps took over.

In an interview with People Magazine in 1975, he was philosophical about his success. It wasn’t the stones that were being sold, he said, so much as the things that came with them.

‘You might say we’ve packaged a sense of humour.’

There’s one person, though, who doesn’t consider stones a laughing matter, and that is my eldest son. To him, stones are deeply serious. In his five years and four months, he’s systematically converted our house into some kind of amateur museum.

I can’t remember exactly when he started picking stones up, but I’m certain it was before he’d had his first birthday. Initially, he’d throw them and then he began studying them and before we could turn around, there we were, in the Ceredgion Rock Museum.
Calchfaen. Gwenithfaen. Cwarts. Tywodfaen.

Marmor. Siâl. Gwydrfaen. Llechen.

Limestone. Granite. Quartz. Sandstone.

Marble. Shale. Obsidian. Slate.

I taste the Welsh names on my tongue...

Some of these can be gathered on the beach. In Aberystwyth, these – rather like the ones in Baja – tend to be a blueish grey, with the odd white one, and some which are speckled like birds’ eggs.

And perhaps they look unspectacular to begin with, but if you’re willing to put in the work there are treasures to be found.

‘You could even use a tumble polisher,’ one of my son’s books says: to achieve a lovely shine. (‘Or if your mother’s a cheapskate, sandpaper will do the job.’)

My therapist once suggested that it might be a good idea if I had a nice stone, to rub in moments of worry. These moments of worry were beginning to become more frequent, and so I hurried down to the beach. I found one, not too far from the bandstand: perfectly oval, in a gorgeous light brown like a Werther’s Original sweet, and completely smooth as if someone had been buffing its surface every day for years.

This is the one, I remember thinking, feeling the comforting warmth between my fingers and thumb.

(Worry stones. Is that the term? Another kind of pet rock, I suppose. Anyway, I lost it in the end – too much pressure.)

About a hundred yards or so from the same beach, there are more stones. These are the ones that can only be purchased in Aberystwyth’s most gothic emporium, Stars: which sells rows and rows of boxes, overflowing with quartzes, amethysts, pyrites and something I’m sure is fake – unicorn quartz. There’s no way to separate these stones from the strong smell of patchouli which hits the back of your throat as you cross the shop’s threshold, and so I think of them as the mystical stones.

Cerrig yr Oesoedd.

Rocks of the ages.

(In recent times, other crystal shops have sprung up all over town, but Stars is the OG.)

There are others, then, which lie on the hills above the town. These have been imported in huge bags from Europe, to be scattered over the paths where the academics walk to work.

‘Sandstone,’ my son says, with great authority.

He’s been up on the paths looking for fossils.

No chance of him finding anything there, Iwan and I think, laughing to each other.

That evening, in his bedroom, he discovers faint etchings on the purple surface of a rock: like small, scratchy umbrellas.

Fossils.

(‘Coral,’ according to the colleague of a friend, when I ask what the markings are. ‘Rugose, probably, but it could be Scleractinian if the rock is younger.’)

My son is ecstatic, and this leads to him noticing all sorts of things, like the fact that they use flint as gravel outside the National Library,

Flint was the first stone to be used to make knives and weapons in the Stone Age. I can’t help but think that gravel feels like something of a downgrade...

Having said that, it’s easy enough to find the stuff lying about on Tan-y-Bwlch beach, under the shadow of the Pen Dinas hillfort.

The yellow-brown nodules are glassy and beautiful.

My son stuffs them into bottles, into the bottom of his school bag, into his pockets.

‘What are you planning to do with them?’

‘I’m going to make a knife that can cut the world in two.’

‘OK,’ I think, hoping I haven’t inadvertently raised a Bond villain.

I find myself promising to take him to the Grand Canyon one day.

He also wants to go to Lanzarote because:

• The whole place is basically 100% volcanic rock
• I told him that I’d once done a handstand there in an old volcano, when he was in my belly, and now he wants to go there like some sort of pilgrimage.

They fill our house, these stones. I discover them under rugs, hidden in boxes, overflowing from his trouser pockets, in the crevices of the washing machine, in my handbag. The dust from the fossils covers our landing like ash.

(The immense shame, I think, of having survived the asteroids only to find yourself crushed into a cheap carpet in Llanbadarn.)

‘This has to stop,’ I say to Iwan. ‘We can’t live like this.’

But it’s too late. Because now I’ve caught the bug. Like my son, I walk with my eyes towards the ground, as if gravity were pulling them down towards any secret place where a stone might be hiding.

I gather them in my hands, inspecting them under January’s watery sun, the mud and dust gathering under my fingernails.

‘I can’t stop picking bloody stones up,’ my father confesses one night. ‘He’s infected us all.’

***

One day, I read about Ferdinand Cheval: a postman from Hauterives, a small village in South-Western France, who built a palace from the stones he found on his daily round.

For thirty years, Cheval painstakingly replicated the complex, fantastical buildings he’d seen as a child in his dreams. To begin with, he carried the stones in his pockets, then in a basket, and finally in a wheelbarrow. He’d work through the night, under gaslight, glueing the stones together with lime, mortar and cement. At last, at the grand age of 77, he finished the task before starting almost immediately on the business of building his own mausoleum...

The Palais Idéal de Facteur Cheval is still open to the public. I Google the pictures. It looks like something Gaudi would have considered and then dismissed as being ‘too much’. With its mythological, Christian and Hindu influences all braiding together, it is oddly beautiful.

And I find myself thinking (once again) about that blurry line separating hobby and madness...

***

Finally, after months of badgering, my son convinces my father to split a stone in half so that he can see what’s hidden inside.

‘Tell him to bring his swimming goggles,’ my father says, over the phone.

My son comes home with the pieces, and what’s amazing – truly amazing – is that this boring, grey stone contains purple crystals, like the inside of some exotic, unfamiliar fruit. Inside another one, there’s a soft centre, which – if you touch it – comes off on the top of your finger like clay, or talcum powder.

‘As if the stone hadn’t quite finished turning into stone,’ Iwan says, with his exasperating habit of making every damn thing sound poetic.

‘Shut up,’ I say.

But he’s right.

***

A few nights later, I’m walking home from work. It’s dark and I must navigate a woody path before I’m able to reach the safety of the streetlamps below.

‘Idiot,’ my mother says. ‘I don’t understand why you don’t just get a taxi.’

I shrug, smiling, my body already halfway out of the front door. But the truth of the matter is that I am scared. Every week, I’m full of bravado at 6pm, but three hours later, when the light has vanished, it’s a different story. I’ve imagined lots of terrible things happening to me on this path smelling of soil and dampness and foxes. Each scenario involves my having to fight someone. What do they say you should always carry? Oh yes, I think, as I come past the far edges of the university campus: keys. But what exactly are you supposed to do with them? As I’m considering this I look down, and I find – under the very last streetlamp before darkness takes over – stones. Loads of them, lying just to side of the path.

Almost without thinking, I pick one up: it fits comfortably into the palm of my hand. It’s not smooth like the flint, but rather angular, jagged, harsh. Instinctively, I know there’s nothing beautiful about this stone, nothing special. And yet, this is the one I choose. Mechanically, my hand moves the stone to my pocket. Selecting the torch setting on my phone, I walk, my heart clamouring in my chest, into the powdery darkness of this tree-lined tunnel which veers down, ever down, into blackness.

‘I think the Gruffalo lives here.’

That’s what I said to my son, once, when we went to pick apples on this path.

‘Don’t say that’ he said. ‘It’ll give me nightmares.’

‘Sorry,’ I said, guilty at having frightened him.

Tonight, I concentrate on the sound of my breathing, on the uninteresting sound of my feet on the concrete. Sometimes I think I hear the snuffling of an invisible animal in the bushes. But what scares me the most is the thought of what might be following me. Or who might be coming to meet me from the depths.

The rock nestles in my hand, cold and still, until - at last – I reach the street.

It remains in my hand until I reach home.

You could market that, I think to myself, as I drop it outside the house. The modern woman’s pet rock. A multi-purpose weapon.

Quietly, I open the front door.

Inside, it’s lovely and warm. The children have been sleeping for hours.

Outside, in the cold, the rock lies – playing dead – near the plant pot, with all the others, waiting.

Hank Williams

When I was six years old, my father played me a record by a man named Hank Williams.

‘Listen this this,’ he said.

The man’s voice sounded sad and funny at the same time, making me feel as if we might understand each other, if we were ever given the opportunity to meet.

As one song followed another, I began to feel sure that we would meet: it was simply a matter of time.

The details – what I would say to him, what he would say to me – would happen as naturally as winter melting into spring.

We would understand each other, he and I.

And maybe the whole thing felt more realistic because we shared a surname: Williams.

This man, with his crooked smile and his white hat, felt as real to me as my own brother.

(More real, in fact, because I saw him every day whereas my actual brother was away surfing in far-off place like Indonesia.)

He was related to us, somehow.

‘Where does he live?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Hank - where does he live?’

‘Oh,’ Dad said, quietly. ‘He’s dead, love.’

Under my ribs, I felt my heart breaking. Not enough to hurt me terribly, but creating a hairline crack, completely invisible but still, a crack.

(There’s no way of truly knowing whether it’s still there, but I sense from listening to my own melancholic songs that it probably is.)

Over the ensuing years, the same thing kept happening.

Elvis, The Big Bopper, Leadbelly.

I became expert at hiding my disappointment.

‘Let me guess’, I’d says, upon hearing a new musician. ‘Dead?’

The whole thing became a joke: my dead musical friends and me.

Each time, the shock became a little easier to bear. I became harder, more cynical until, at last, I felt nothing.

I’ve got a heart like asbestos now.

Unmoving like a stone.

When I heard Karen Dalton for the first time, I already expected the worst. The same thing with Townes Van Zandt...

I play Hank to the boys, and they love him too.

‘I’m so lonesome I could cry.’

Deliciously sad.

But they don’t share a surname with him, you see, and so they don’t mind so much that he’s dead.

Dad is 81 this year...

Anyway, I don’t think too much about that.

It’s just that the songs cause the mind to wander, that’s all.

Coach

I’m certain that a word must exist, somewhere, for that very specific feeling you get when you see the National Express parked outside the Wetherspoons in Aberystwyth, ready to embark upon its mega-trip to London.

If the sky happens to be that particular shade of blue, and the temperature on the crisp side of freezing, you have to summon every fibre of your being to stop yourself from jumping onto the vehicle before it leaves.

‘The same feeling,’ Iwan says, ‘as the one that makes you want to jump off a cliff when you’re looking down at the sea.’

‘Or’ he says, later, ‘if you come from Pen Llyn and you hear Bryn Fon singing about the Pwllheli bus leaving town.’

(I’ll have to take his word for this.)

Thinking about it properly, I realise that I’ve tended to follow this feeling throughout my life.

After leaving Aber for the first time, my life became one long chain of leavings, ones which made me feel alive and, let’s face it, glamorous.

I don’t know; maybe I just like leaving parties.

Not so much these days, mind.

Today, I smile serenely at the young students waiting by the bus stop, pushing my pram like some sort of patronising older sister.

The paint on the side of the bus gleams, in contrast with the seagull shit on the pavement, the overflowing bins, the smell of morning cigarettes.

A white dove meanders past, a little shaky. She’s always here, the same colour as the coach.

Steam rises from the pub kitchen.

And we leave them, the travellers.

In Aberystwyth, we’re familiar with people leaving.

This is what always happens on the last stop on the train line.

It’s always an option. Leaving, I mean.

But for today, we comfort ourselves with the sea and the sky and the cigarettes we don’t smoke anymore.

We are the ones who stay, and that feels good too, doesn’t it?

March

Crows carrying branches to build nests, little green things pushing up from in between the stones on the path to the National Library, primroses, cold winds, woodpeckers beginning to drill holes in the woods behind the garden. My eldest son stuffs his nose into the depths of a daffodil, and the pollen covers his nostrils like sherbet for the rest of the day. Aquamarine is the Stone of the Month in the new crystal shop across the road from the cafe.

Moss

I meet a woman specialising in moss. She’s been on a pilgrimage all over Britain documenting and researching mosses for a book. She knows all the names, even the rare ones, and praises Cors Caron as being one of the best places in the world for finding moss. I suspect that she can talk to the stuff, too, because I find her one morning, standing perfectly still in our garden, gazing up at the trees, in some sort of prayer, as if she were listening to the greenness, at all the things it was whispering to her. I’m afraid to disturb her, and so I busy myself in the kitchen, stuffing bread into the toaster and labouring over the filter coffee. She returns, a few minutes later, her arms gathered around her body for warmth and tells me that we have good moss. I feel my chest expanding with pride, as if she’d told me I had special powers.