Lens or no lens

The tortoiseshell glasses lie crooked on Brighton’s pebbles, one lens popped clean out, the other clouded by salt and tiny scratches. A careless loss, perhaps, or a deliberate abandonment. But pick them up, put them on, close one eye, and what do you see?

Close your right eye first, and your left eye is looking through the lens, a single murky pane. Brighton dissolves. The horizon bleeds into sea into sky, a soft bruise of grey and lavender. Pebbles lose their edges, merging into a gentle shingle fog. People drift past like half-remembered stories, voices muffled by distance or time. The gulls are mere pale smudges, their cries dulled to far-off keening. Somewhere, laughter unspools, slow and echoing, as though the beach is remembering a day long gone - a day of dancing on warm stones, of salt-sticky kisses under the boards of the pier. Colours fade into a tender hush. The world is no longer urgent; it sighs, lingers, closes its heavy eyes. Brighton becomes a place not quite here, not quite then - a beach caught halfway between waking and a kind, salt-scented sleep.

Close your left eye, and your right eye is looking through no lens. The beach glares up at you, alive and unashamed. Each pebble is distinct - ochre, slate, coral pink - jostling for its moment in the sun. Gulls wheel overhead, white knives against a cobalt sky, their cries cutting clean through the warm hum of voices. Chips wrapped in paper steam on picnic rugs, vinegar spitting under bright fingers. A child’s shriek rings out, pure and startled, as a wave snaps at his ankles. The pier stretches out brazenly, strutting on iron legs, hung with lights like careless jewellery. Everything is immediate, urgent, shouting to be noticed: the salt on your lips, the warmth seeping into your soles, the wide-open promise of the afternoon. Brighton is a riot of small perfections, each clamouring for your eye - and nothing is softened, nothing spared.

Tomorrow? The history of sunglasses!