SAND

"the multi-coloured sweetshop
of tiny wonders"

It's raining. My lunchtime walk was a brisk march through curtains of water, dripping off my hood and sinking through my socks.

It reminds me of holidays. We'd sit on the beach in the kind of storm only England knows how to produce, watching the waves crash in, munching Marmite sandwiches and huddling together in anoraks under a golf umbrella.

"It'll pass," my Dad would say, "It's only a shower," or, "Think about the sea - it's wet out there!"

Sooner or later, we'd be brushing off crusty sand from our clothes and complaining about how it got into the picnic box. I know we look back on these times with rose-tinted glasses, but I kind of hope Heaven has a rain-soaked English beach somewhere where the grey sea smashes into the pockmarked sand.

Sand is fascinating: rocks and shells that have been eroded for thousands of summers and thousands of winters, rolling and crashing together, mixed and tumbled by the ocean, until finely ground into tiny grains, smaller than the ridges of your fingerprint. You can dig holes, build castles with moats, bury your Dad or even use it to time a boiled egg.

Look at it though, when it's under a microscope. The picture shows it magnified 250 times. Amazing isn't it? Like a jewellery box of priceless gems, a multi-coloured sweetshop of tiny wonders.

Somebody once said that humanity is a little like a beach made of billions of grains of sand - an ocean of tiny gemstones of which all of us are a part. I really like this idea. You may have had a lifetime of trouble, rolling in the deep of a roaring ocean, crashing mercilessly against the rough edges of other people and situations; you might think of yourself as an insignificant dot, shuffling along with all the other insignificant dots in the terrible emptiness of the world. You're not though, are you?

I walked back to the office with droplets of rain collecting on my glasses. I threw off my hood and pushed through the revolving door, swiping my feet across the mat.

"It's wet out there," said the receptionist. I smiled.